


take care to bury all that you can

by illateasee



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, F/F, M/M, exploring trauma through the eyes of your favorite characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:20:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 36,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illateasee/pseuds/illateasee
Summary: “Beau, why are you defending him?” Jester looks at her, curious, and Beau----well, Beau doesn’t know why. Or, she doesn’tknowwhy, but she could probably guess.She remembers all too well what happened during sophomore year--how they all lost something, but Yasha lost almost everything. How she could never quite figure out how to be there for her. How Obann managed to break through, when she couldn’t, and offered Yasha support in ways Beau never was able to.--Sometimes, in moments of instability, you’ll grab any life preserver someone throws your way. Yasha has bad friends. The Nein help her get through it.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Yasha, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Caduceus Clay/Fjord, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Obann & Yasha (Critical Role)
Comments: 123
Kudos: 295





	1. i'm gonna miss it when it's over

**Author's Note:**

> Hi friends! I’ve never published multi-chaptered fic before! This is my very first one! Please go easy on me. I am a college student with lots of homework and I cannot promise I won’t update this super irregularly. 
> 
> This is a fic about emotionally abusive friendships. I wanted to explore the dynamic Yasha and Obann had in an environment I’m more familiar with (namely, a modern one). I want to make this clear right from the beginning because I know that emotional abuse is something that could potentially trigger someone (hence the rating). If that someone is you, please know that I am sending all kinds of warm fuzzy happy vibes your way, and maybe you should read a different fic.  
> Also, to be clear, Yasha’s a lesbian, so there’s no romance between her and Obann at all. Friendships can be just as shitty as romantic relationships. 
> 
> Title is from Leave A Trace by CHVRCHES.  
> Okay, thanks for reading, carry on!

“Hey, Beau, when was the last time you saw Yasha?”

Jester flips another card over on the rickety wooden kitchen table in the corner of the coffee shop where they’ve been holding weekly game nights for the past two years. The card has a picture of a donut on it, with ten blue sprinkles and the number three written in the middle in elaborate cursive. 

Beau squints suspiciously at Jester as she giggles innocently and gathers up a handful of the cards laid out on the table, the blue-sprinkles-donut-three included. She was having her ass handed to her at a game that she helped Jester invent, which was...embarrassing. “I dunno. It was a while ago.”

Jester hums thoughtfully and flips another card. A green lollipop, the number seven--Beau lets out a proud _hah_ and scoops it into her own pile while Jester pouts. “I feel like we’ve hardly seen her all year! I invited her to game night and she didn’t even answer my text, Beau.” 

Beau feels a twinge of something unidentifiable in her chest as she glances out at the rest of her friends, spread across the coffee shop--Caleb is curled into the couch, reading a book and glancing up over the top of it every once in a while to observe as Fjord plays what Beau can only assume is a very high-stakes game of cards--maybe poker?--with Nott on the floor, spare decks of cards spread out over the soft rug. Caduceus, with his ill-fitting too-big apron tied around his waist, like, three times, pours fresh cups of tea for the three of them and steps politely over Fjord and Nott’s mess with the familiar look on his face that tells Beau that he has no idea what the hell they’re doing. He approaches Beau and Jester’s table with teacups and pastries for them as Beau flips over the next card and triumphantly swipes the yellow ribbon with the number thirteen written across it to her side of the table. 

“How are you fine folks doing tonight?” Caduceus says in his slow voice as Jester sticks her tongue out at Beau. 

“Aw, c’mon, Caduceus, you don’t have to be so formal with us. We’re your friends!” Jester eagerly takes a bite of the pastry he brought, something with flaky dough that’s covered in powdered sugar. A bit of the sugar goes flying as she speaks. Beau tries not to find it endearing. 

“You’re my friends _and_ my customers.”

“Deuces, no one else is even here,” Beau points out, gesturing at the empty tables and couches and chairs. It’s late--getting close to nine o’clock in the evening--and the coffee shop that Caduceus’s family owns and operates is as deserted as any coffee shop in a small town at nine would be. 

Before Caduceus can get in a reply, Jester finishes her bite and speaks up again. “Caduceus, have YOU seen Yasha lately?”

“Well, sure. She’s in my math class.” Caduceus starts pouring tea into cups as Jester wipes her hand on her skirt and flips another card--a figure in a green cloak holding a finger to his lips with a mischievous smile. Beau and Jester both dive for it in the same instant, but Jester gets there first, and laughs as Beau groans in defeat. Caduceus, who is used to their antics by now, doesn’t even pause in his tea pouring as the table is jostled. 

“Wait, she’s been in school?” Beau asks suddenly. “I thought she dropped out, like, a year ago.”

“She didn’t drop out! See, you really haven’t seen her!” Jester pouts. 

“She does miss a lot of school, to be fair.” Caduceus takes a slow seat at the table, watching as Beau cleans up the homemade cards after Jester’s win. “She’s always out with that friend of hers.”

Beau frowns. She knows, without asking, who Caduceus means. Jester does, too, if her own sour expression is any indication.

“I really hate that guy,” Jester says. 

“Hate what guy?” Suddenly, Fjord is pulling up a chair behind Caduceus. Caleb and Nott trail behind him. 

Nott leans on Jester’s shoulders. “Yeah, who do we need to beat the shit out of?”

“Obann,” Beau says, “and let’s maybe not beat the shit out of Yasha’s friend?”

“But what if he, like, totally deserves it, though?” Jester says thoughtfully. “Remember how he toooootally screwed over that one girl freshman year?” 

“Her name was Jourrael,” Caduceus adds. 

“Yeah! Jourrael, poor Jourrael.” 

“Jourrael got a direct admit to some exclusive program at Xhorhas U the other day, so I think she’s doing okay, actually.”

“Beau, why are you defending him?” Jester looks at her, curious, and Beau--

\--well, Beau doesn’t know why. Or, she doesn’t _know_ why, but she could probably guess. 

She remembers all too well what happened during sophomore year--how they all lost something, but Yasha lost almost everything. How she could never quite figure out how to be there for her. How Obann managed to break through, when she couldn’t, and offered Yasha support in ways Beau never was able to. She still crashes in his apartment, as far as Beau is aware.

Obann creeps her out. He always has. Some people have what Beau would describe as “sleazy energy,” and Obann is one of them--her dad is another, and any trait that Beau recognizes in her father isn’t exactly something she’d look for in a friend. But she isn’t Yasha, and what right does she really have to tell Yasha who she can and can’t be friends with? 

She just shrugs, and hopes that it answers Jester’s question well enough. But then it turns out the conversation has moved on without her, and Caleb is nervously rambling about college applications. Beau groans at the reminder: it’s already November, and the early admission applications her parents are forcing her to do are due sooner than she’d like to think about, considering how incredibly not finished they are. 

Eventually, Fjord pulls out another pack of cards. He and Nott both collect ones with interesting designs, and the one Fjord lays out on the rickety table is new. The cards have scenic paintings of the ocean, calm, on the backside of them. Caduceus, Beau notices, smiles when he sees them, and leans in to whisper something to Fjord that she can’t quite hear. Nott, on the other hand, makes judgy comments about the quality of the cards’ material, which Fjord accepts with a thin smile that makes Beau think he’s two minutes from punting Nott out of the nearest window.

_As if he even could,_ Beau thinks Nott would say, if Fjord’s defenestration-related intentions were to be vocalized. 

Using Fjord’s calm ocean cards, they all play a few games of BS. For some reason, Caduceus wins all but the last round, which goes to Fjord. It does not help that Nott, Jester, and Caleb all cannot bluff convincingly to save their lives. Beau thinks she’s an okay liar, but she is no Fjord, and she is definitely no Caduceus.

After that, it’s after ten o’clock, and Beau knows her dad will kill her if she isn’t in her room, diligently doing her homework by eleven, and Caduceus has to close up the cafe, so hats and scarves and gloves and coats get piled on in preparation to face a chilly November night. Beau, for her part, dons just a simple hoodie and a beanie. She runs warm. 

They say goodbye to Caduceus. Clarabelle ducks down from the apartment above the Blooming Grove Coffee & Tea Shoppe and ruffles Caduceus’s hair as they go. 

“Thank you, again, for letting us use your space so late,” Fjord tells her.

She waves him off. “Anything for the little bro.” Caduceus looks uncharacteristically like he would much rather be anywhere else.

After they get outside, Fjord, Nott, and Caleb head one way, and Beau and Jester, whose families live on the same side of town, a few blocks apart, head in the other. 

Jester forgot her gloves. She rubs her hands together close to her chest, trying to warm them. Beau wants to hold Jester’s hands in her own, wants to kiss the backs of them gently--

\--the thing about Jester and Beau’s families living on the same side of town is that Beau has a lot of gay thoughts when they’re walking home, just the two of them. It’s really fucking inconvenient, Beau has discovered, to have gay thoughts about your best friend so often. 

Thankfully, Jester is very talkative, so Beau wouldn’t get the chance to put gay words to the gay thoughts anyway. 

“--and I just wish he would SAY something to him, you know? I mean, did you see that? Even CLARABELLE loves him, Beau,” Jester is saying, and Beau panics with the realization that she hasn’t been paying attention.

“Uh--yeah, totally.”

Jester shakes her head dramatically. “Being the matchmaker of the group is SO FRUSTRATING sometimes, Beau.” 

_Ah,_ Beau realizes, _this is about Fjord and Caduceus again._

When they were freshmen, Jester was head-over-heels for Fjord. Beau’s known Jester for most of their lives, and had never seen her so happy as the summer before high school, watching her pine for their friend. But--despite Nott’s best efforts--Fjord never seemed to notice, and eventually, Jester seemed to just...lose interest.

Beau never asked what changed. They’re best friends, but they’ve never really talked about romantic stuff--and Beau didn’t want to make Jester upset, or bring up something she’d rather just ignore. So she stayed quiet, and when, a year later, Caduceus Clay entered their lives, Jester was the first to notice his affection for her own ex-crush. 

Beau was “sleeping over” at Jester’s house one day that spring, when it first really came up. Their sleepovers weren’t real sleepovers, because Beau’s dad would kill her if she spent a full night under a roof that didn’t belong to him, but they would hang out all day after school until Beau had to cross the street and walk the two blocks back to her own house. They were laying on Jester’s bed, Beau halfheartedly doing homework, and Jester reading a book. 

“Do you think Caduceus has a crush on Fjord?” 

“What?” Beau remembers how she’d sat up and seen Jester there, a well-worn favorite romance novel laying open on her chest, her hair--long, back then, not yet dyed blue--sprawled out across the comforter. She’d been looking up at the ceiling thoughtfully.

“I think Caduceus likes him,” she’d added, “and I think that Fjord may like him back.”

“Wh--how d’you figure that?” Beau’d asked, bewildered by Jester’s sudden interest in their friends’ romantic lives. 

“Didn’t you notice? Fjord has a new charm on his bracelet,” Jester had said, flipping over to lay on her stomach and look at Beau properly. “I think Caduceus made it. Isn’t that cute?”

Beau had noticed. Fjord had been wearing that old friendship bracelet on his wrist for as long as Beau had known him, with its single solitary charm in the shape of a pirate ship wheel. Of course she’d noticed when, suddenly, a new charm, a blue crystal that looked like ocean waves, had suddenly appeared beside it. She had even asked during the freshman English class she shared with Fjord, but he’d just waved her off. When Beau told Jester that, she’d giggled.

“I think they’d be a cute couple,” she’d said, and Beau had wanted to ask. Wanted to ask, _does this mean you’re over him now? That you’re officially Not Into Fjord anymore?_

But they didn’t talk about their love lives. So she never did.

“It’s been over a year, Jes, maybe it just isn’t meant to be,” present-day Beau says. “Or maybe you should just, like, lock them in a room together until they figure their shit out. Seven minutes in heaven, or whatever.”

Jester narrows her eyes at Beau, who smiles. “That takes all of the fun out of it, though! The drama. The angst!” She presses a hand to her chest, her chilly fingers apparently forgotten. “The ROMANCE of it all, Beau!”

“We’re high schoolers, not ancient magical revolutionaries,” Beau teases. Jester gasps, scandalized. 

“Just because we’re high schoolers doesn’t mean we don’t deserve love stories, Beauregard.” Jester shakes her head, and Beau smiles even wider. She’s glad it’s so cold outside that she has an excuse for the flush in her cheeks.

They reach Jester’s house too soon, and Jester gives Beau a warm hug on the sidewalk. She looks like she wants to say something else, and Beau wants so badly for her to say it, to prolong this part of her day so she doesn’t have to go home and be alone in her bedroom for the rest of the night. But instead, Jester just smiles, brightly, and waves goodbye as she bounces up to her own front door and goes inside.

Beau watches her go until she has no excuse to be standing out on the empty sidewalk in the cold anymore, then heads to her own house, and creeps up the stairs so as to not distract her father from his football game. It isn’t until she’s in her room, the door shut, and getting ready for bed that she remembers the conversation about Yasha.

She thinks about how weird it is that she’d thought Yasha dropped out, because she just never saw her at school anymore. How long had it been, really? 

She scrolls through the text messages in her phone until she finds her last conversation with Yasha, almost six months ago. She feels a twinge of guilt realizing that it was a simple “hey,” from Yasha, that Beau had forgotten to answer. Before she can think better of it, she types out a reply, several months too late, and sends it. 

In the small hours of the morning, long after Beau has fallen asleep, the sky outside splits open, and a thunderstorm begins.


	2. no place for promises here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi again! Just checking in because I updated some tags for this, namely Canonical Character Death, and I wanted to clarify that this isn’t because it really comes up all that much in this chapter, but more just because I forgot to include it originally and I don’t want to bamboozle anyone later on. 
> 
> Also some quick cw for this chapter: there’s smoking but it isn’t shown! Also mention of skipping meals but no actual meals are skipped. Don't skip meals, fam.  
> Okay thanks hope you enjoy! <3

Yasha’s sitting outside the door to Obann’s apartment at five in the morning when she checks her phone and sees the text.

Normally, she’d never be up and out this early, but Obann is smoking again, and the smell of it makes her lungs feel like they’re twisted and painful. The early morning air, on the other hand, is fresh and thick with the smell of rain. 

Yasha loves the rain. It reminds her of her brother, off at college. She really should call him.

_ hey, how’s it goin?  _ the text reads. From Beauregard, she guesses, based on the fact that it’s a local area code, and the last text message she’d sent this person was months ago. A simple “hey,” gone unanswered.

Unanswered until now, Yasha supposes. 

A few months back, Obann convinced her to delete a bunch of old phone numbers from her phone--numbers of people she didn’t talk to anymore. She even wound up getting rid of Zuala’s number, but she still has it committed to memory. It’s not as if she could even text Zuala anymore anyway. 

She debates, for a moment, whether she should reply or not. She has no idea what’s prompted Beau to text her now, suddenly, out of the blue. She hasn’t even seen her since June--has only seen the others, Beau’s friends, previously Yasha’s friends, in passing since then.

She knows what Obann would say. He’s said it before--that she deserves better than friends who shut her out when she needs them, who ignore her texts for six months. 

_ It’s going okay. This is Beauregard, right?  _

Yasha pauses, for a moment, then adds:

_ How are you? _

The door beside her bangs open and she startles, her phone clattering to the concrete floor in the open-air hallway outside the apartment. Obann leans out past the doorframe.

“There you are. Almost thought you’d run off,” he says, “or gone to school early.”

She shrugs. “Just enjoying the storm.” She picks up her phone, thankfully not shattered--she could never afford a replacement--and slowly ambles to her feet. She’s taller than Obann, a fact which has always annoyed him. “How would I get to school without you as my ride?” 

He smiles. “Come inside and get dressed. You look like a homeless person, all out in the rain in your pajamas like that.”

_ I am a homeless person, _ Yasha does not say. She follows Obann inside. 

***

When Yasha was younger, she repeated the first grade.

She didn’t care much at the time, and doesn’t care much now, either, but she remembers her teacher sending her home with a thick pink envelope. She remembers her mother taking her in to see the elementary school principal, teary-eyed. She remembers the calm face the principal had put on as he had explained the situation, and the way her mother had eventually accepted that this is what would be best for her daughter. 

So Yasha went to first grade twice, and met Mollymauk, Beauregard, Jester, and Fjord there, the second go around. Caleb and Nott moved to town a few years later. Zuala transferred in a few months after that. 

All this to say that Yasha is the oldest senior at their high school, at nineteen. School feels like a formality, now. She just needs her diploma, so that she can get a job, and that’s it. 

Obann has already graduated--he was in the year above Yasha in school, the year she should have been in. He’s the one who takes her to school, who convinced her to keep going to school at all, after getting kicked out. When Yasha nervously admitted to not particularly wanting to go to college, he was nothing but supportive, though. And he still lets her skip class, sometimes.

Yasha wonders what her mom would say. What her brother would say. 

Obann drives her to school that morning, just like every other. “Who were you texting?”

“What?” 

“This morning. When you were outside. Who were you texting?” 

Yasha glances, almost reflexively, at her phone, sitting in her palm. She checked before they left--no reply yet. “I don’t know,” she says, “it was just some unknown number. I deleted it.”

She isn’t sure why she ends up lying. Isn’t sure why her heartbeat goes fast as she does, why she can’t bring herself to look over at Obann in the driver’s seat next to her. He doesn’t say anything, but Yasha stays tense all the way to the high school parking lot. 

Obann pulls in to a spot on the far side of the lot, out of the way of most of the other cars, but near enough that Yasha won’t have to walk too far. He taps her shoulder, and she jumps slightly and finally pulls her gaze up from her own sneakers. He’s smiling, his arms outstretched for a hug. She gives him one.

He taps the back of her neck, where her tattoo is. He has the same one in the same place--a good luck charm they’d gotten together. She relaxes, and smiles back at him.

“Have fun,” he says, and she rolls her eyes as she steps out of the car. “See you here, same time as always.” She nods, and then he’s off, and it’s just Yasha.

She huffs, adjusts her backpack, and heads inside. 

***

Yasha deleted her number. 

Beau tries not to be  _ too  _ surprised. They haven’t had any classes together in years and they never see each other--why would Yasha  _ have  _ her number? Why is Beau getting upset when she’s the one who ignored Yasha for months?

_ It’s going okay. This is Beauregard, right? _

_ How are you? _

The texts came in just after five in the morning. Beau spends a moment while she’s frantically rushing to get ready for school to wonder why Yasha was up so early. 

There’s a knock on her bedroom door. “Beauregard, I am going to be late if we don’t leave now.” Her mother’s voice. Beau is half-dressed, her books and homework still scattered all over her desk and the floor. This is what she gets for sleeping through her alarm, she guesses.

She makes a frantic grab for her phone and sends a pleading text to Jester, who replies within moments that she’ll happily give Beau a ride. 

“I’ll just go with Jes, mom, you can leave without me,” she calls through the door, continuing in her search for a clean pair of pants. 

“Are you sure? I’ll tell your father to come check on you in twenty minutes, and if you’re still here, you’ll be in big trouble, young lady,” her mom says, and Beau groans. As much as she’d love to, she knows she can’t risk skipping school.

“I’m sure, mom. Please just go.”

Beau can perfectly picture her mother pinching the bridge of her nose before she hears the click of heels moving away from her bedroom door. 

A few minutes later, she finally finishes getting dressed and shoves all the papers she’s pretty sure she needs today into her backpack as she hears the honk of a car outside. Her phone buzzes with an “I’m here!” from Jester, followed by several multicolored heart emojis. Beau smiles, and makes her way downstairs and shuffles into the front seat of Jester’s car.

“Good morning, Beau!” Jester holds out a croissant. “Here, eat some breakfast.” 

Beau takes it gratefully. “How’d you know I didn’t eat?”

“You never eat when you oversleep,” she says simply, pulling away from the curb and flipping the radio on to some generic bubbly pop station. Jester hums along to what Beau thinks might be a new Taylor Swift song. 

“Thanks for the ride. And the food,” Beau says when the song ends. “You are a lifesaver.”

“It’s no problem! I was gonna drive anyway. And you need to eat, silly.” Jester pulls into her assigned spot in the high school parking lot. As they walk towards the entrance to the school, Jester grabs her hand. 

This is not unusual, Beau tells herself. Jester is very physically affectionate. They’ve held hands tons of times--Jester holds hands with whoever’s nearby, really. Beau still has to stop herself from giving Jester’s hand a little squeeze as they go.

Fjord catches up to them as they’re about to go inside, and Jester drops Beau’s hands to give him a big good morning hug, which he reciprocates gladly.

It’s right as Beau is about to ask Fjord if he’s ready for first period gym that someone runs into her from behind.

“Hey--watch it!” 

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the person says, and Beau turns, and--oh. 

It’s Yasha. Beau suddenly remembers she never responded to the text Yasha sent this morning. 

“Yasha!” The girl in question oomfs as a blue-haired blur moves to wrap her in a hug. Jester barely comes up past Yasha’s waist, but she is deceptively strong, and gives hugs that make sure you know that. Yasha looks a little frantic and surprised at the reception. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Uh--good to see you too,” Yasha says, giving Jester a half-hearted pat on the back as she pulls away. She nods to Beau and Fjord in turn, and each of them nods back. Her eyes linger on Beau a little longer than she was expecting, and Beau swallows under the weight of that gaze. 

“Yasha, did you get my text?” Jester is still talking, and Yasha’s eyes suddenly snap back to her. “You’re still totally welcome to come next week if you want to!” 

“Come--where?”

“To game night! You  _ did  _ get my text, right? Did you change your number?” 

Yasha looks bewildered. “No, I didn’t get a text from you, Jester.” 

“Oh.” Jester’s brow furrows. “Well, we play games every week at the Blooming Grove Coffee & Tea Shoppe--you know where that is, right? Over on Main Street? Anyway, we’re there on Thursdays at seven, you should come hang out with us!”

“Oh, uh. I don’t know if I can. But thank you.” Yasha glances around at the students milling past them through the hallway. “I have to go to class now. Goodbye.”

For such a tall, imposing figure, Yasha moves fast. She doesn’t blend in to the crowd--the leather jacket and the half-bleached hair and the six-something feet of height make sure of that--but she’s down the hall and around the corner before Beau has the chance to properly wave goodbye. 

“She’s in an awful hurry,” Fjord says.

“She’s probably just late or something. Speaking of, you guys should go! The gym is all the way on the other side of school!” Jester gives Beau’s shoulder a playful shove. 

“Alright, alright, we’re going,” Beau says, giving Jester a wave as they part, and Jester heads to her math class down the hall. 

“Weird to see Yasha after you guys were talking about her yesterday.” Fjord fiddles with the strap on his backpack, and Beau notices the chipped blue nail polish he wears. 

“Yeah,” she replies. “I texted her, last night, after I got home, actually.”

“Really?” Fjord says. “What did you say?”

“Just hello. How are you. That kind of thing.”

“Did she reply? Or did she ignore you like she did Jester?” 

“You think she ignored Jester’s text?” 

“I mean, what else could that have been?” Fjord scoffs a little laugh. “She was in such a rush to get out of there.”

“Well, she replied to me, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Weird.” 

Beau pulls out her phone and reads the messages again. “I think she deleted my number. She asked if it was me, when she texted back.” She pauses. “So maybe she just deleted Jester’s number or something.”

“Wouldn’t the text still go through, though? I mean, yours did.” 

“I don’t fuckin’ know, man.” Beau shakes her head. “Whatever. I’m gonna keep texting her.” 

“I can’t stop you,” Fjord says. “I’ll see you in there.”

“Yeah, see you,” Beau says absently as Fjord pushes his way into the boys’ locker room. She heads for the girls’, still focused on how to respond to Yasha’s texts. 

_ yeah, this is beau. I’m good.  _

_ it was cool to see you this morning, you really should come hang out w us next week _

_ I mean, if you want _

She feels like she definitely could’ve phrased that less awkwardly. But the texts are already sent, and Beau is going to be super late to gym class if she doesn’t get changed. 

So she puts her phone in her bag and tries to forget about it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! <3 Chapter two title is from Gun, by CHVRCHES.


	3. though far away, we're still the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi friends! There’s no major cw for this chapter that I can think of, so instead I’ll just say please enjoy! <3

Fjord remembers being a very athletic little kid.

He’d been in the foster care system for as long as he could remember, and sometimes the families who took care of him would have kids his age. He was always a bit bigger than them, and sometimes that seemed to make them find him off-putting. He’d run circles around in their backyards for hours. 

He had an older brother, too, once, when he was really, really little--it’s the first family he remembers being with. He always thought his older brother was the coolest person in the whole world. He even gave Fjord a friendship bracelet--Fjord’s had a pirate ship wheel charm, and Vandren’s had a yellow jewel that looked like a cat’s eye. The eye always creeped Fjord out, which made Vandren laugh.

He transferred to a different family, when Vandren’s moved away. 

When he was in his sophomore year, he broke his leg. He had to have surgery. After that, he was still big, but he was less athletic. His current foster parents did their best to help him through it, but sometimes he was still sore, and easily winded. He’d only just convinced his moms to let him go to gym class again this year, on the promise from the principal that he’d be in the same class as Beau, and that she would help him if he needed it.

He did need it, it turned out. But he tried very, very hard not to. 

“D’you need to sit out?” Beau glances over at him and slows her pace around the track as he pauses to catch his breath. They’re outside on a chilly November morning and the skies are pale grey with thin, foggy clouds--not that Fjord can see them from his current position, half bowled over and trying to keep from looking too out of shape in front of Beau.

“No, I’ve got it,” he says through heaves. 

“Are you sure? If you pass out I’m not carrying you to the nurse’s office again.” 

“I’m fine, Beau.” She rolls her eyes at him, but stops fully to make sure he’s okay anyway before they keep running. 

After gym, the day is a lot easier. All of Fjord’s midterms were last week, and the week after midterms is usually a breath of fresh air compared to the week before them. By the time lunch rolls around, the foggy morning has given way to something warmer and sunnier, and as he’s stepping out of his history classroom, someone runs past him and grabs his elbow, dragging him along the hallway at a brisk pace. 

“We’re eating outside today!” Jester says as she drags him. He flashes apologetic smiles to the people she almost runs them into along the way. Once they burst out of the doors to the school’s courtyard, a grassy area with picnic tables and a sparse handful of trees with orange and yellow leaves piling up beneath them by the day, Jester starts waving to a picnic table off to one side, where Beau, Caduceus, Caleb, and Nott are already waiting. 

“Very nice of you to join us,” Caduceus says. Fjord knows Caduceus well enough, now, to know that although that statement could be taken as a sarcastic drag, he likely means it completely sincerely. Caduceus is a very honest, straightforward person. It’s grounding.

He slides into the open spot on the bench next to Caduceus, and Jester finds her way to a seat across from him. 

“Hey, dude, did you study for the human geo test yet?” Beau’s eating food from the cafeteria, which means she overslept and/or forgot to pack a lunch. 

“Ja? Beau, it is today.” Caleb is splitting a packed lunch with Nott, who’s craning her neck over her shoulder, looking out over the people in the courtyard behind them. 

“What? No, it’s not.”

“It is. November the eighth, Beau.” 

Beau looks up thoughtfully at the sky and starts counting something on her fingers before her eyes widen in alarm. “Oh, shit.”

Caleb sighs. “Do you want to go review in the library?” 

Beau nods as she starts eating the rest of her lunch very fast. Jester pouts. “Awww, you guys are leaving already?”

“Sorry, Jes, but if I blow this test my dad’s gonna kill me.” 

Jester just frowns. “You guys are no fun. Don’t study too hard!” 

“Ja, yes,” Caleb says, passing Nott the rest of the food, which she takes with barely a nod to register Caleb leaving. His mouth twitches into a frown as he follows Beau inside.

“What’s up with her?” Fjord says, pulling his own food out of his bag.

“I’m looking for Yeza,” Nott says suddenly. Fjord hadn’t realized she was listening. “I think he’s out sick today.”

“He wasn’t in English,” Jester says. 

“I knew it!” Finally, Nott turns to face the rest of the table, shaking her head.

“Aren’t you a little afraid that your obsession with his schedule might come off a little...I don’t know. Stalker-ish?” Fjord is suddenly glad he’s on the opposite corner of the table from Nott, who shoots him a look that, unfortunately, is familiar enough that he instantly recognizes it. It means something along the lines of  _ be glad we’re in school and also that Jester is here or else you’d be in Trouble.  _

Nott is short, for her age. She looks young—it doesn’t help that for as long as they’ve known each other, since grade school, she’s worn her dark hair in two braids down her back, run through with ribbons and beads. Fjord knows he’s above average in height—the tallest in their group outside of Caduceus, who, somehow, manages to be nearly seven feet tall at age eighteen—but it still startles him that she barely comes up past his waist. 

He’s pretty sure he could handle her if it came to a real fight, but on the other hand, he almost passed out a few laps into running around the track this morning.

“I am not a stalker,” Nott says indignantly. “I’m just worried for his health!” 

“You should get him a gift. Something to help him get well,” Caduceus adds.

“Oh, that’s a good idea!” Jester’s eyes twinkle. “You could make him a pretty card and write him a nice note inside, Nott!” 

Nott pushes her bangs out of her face, her cheeks tinted red. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” 

“I can help you with it during art class today, if you want!” Jester smiles. “But the note really should be from you.” 

Nott grumbles something that sounds like “I’ll think about it” and starts picking at her food again. Jester rounds on Caduceus.

“You’ve already had math today, right? Was Yasha there?” 

“I believe so.” 

“Beau told me she texted her last night,” Fjord says, and Jester looks surprised.

“Really? She didn’t tell me that.” 

“She didn’t?” 

“Nope,” Jester says, popping the ‘p’. “But she totally should have. I’m the one who asked if she’d seen her lately!” She gasps. “Wait, what did she say?”

“Beau, or Yasha?” 

“Yasha, silly, I already talk to Beau.”

He pauses. “I think she had deleted Beau’s number.”

“What? That’s so ridiculous! Why would she do that?”

“Maybe because they haven’t been friends in over a year?” Nott pipes up. “Why the sudden interest in her well-being, anyway?”

“I just miss her, you guys!” Jester frowns. “And I  _ really  _ don’t like that Obann guy. She should have other friends!” 

“If I can ask, what made you guys stop hanging out with her in the first place?” Caduceus looks confused, and Fjord is reminded, again, that he came into their lives after Yasha had mostly left them. After everything that happened sophomore year, really. An awkward silence falls over the table, and Fjord knows that Jester and Nott don’t know how to answer that, either. 

_ She made it hard to be friends with her,  _ Fjord thinks, but that isn’t quite right. 

_ After that weekend, it was painful to remember, and being around Yasha made it harder to forget. _ A little closer.

Fjord is good with words. It’s something his English teachers tell him all the time. He has his awkward moments, sure, but he’s good at talking his way out of them. It’s like a game: you can soothe anyone’s concerns away, if you just put the right phrases in the right order.

But there are things, feelings, parts of himself he still struggles to put words to. Yasha, Zuala, Molly. Vandren. His birth parents, wherever they are. Caduceus.

“We ran into her this morning and I told her she should come to game night next week,” Jester says, finally, avoiding Caduceus’s question. “So maybe she’ll come, and we can all be friends again!” 

Fjord doesn’t think it’s quite that simple, but knows that telling Jester as much would be pointless. Yasha said she probably couldn’t come, anyway, moments before running off like the mere sight of them all was something she was allergic to. 

He finishes his lunch, takes a pastry when Caduceus offers him one from home, and tries to tell himself that he doesn’t have to worry about Yasha anymore.

***

“And which language branch is the biggest?” 

“Indo-European,” Beau says. She adds, “Which makes sense, considering that India-through-Europe is fuckin’ huge.” 

“Right,” Caleb says.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” she mumbles. “I don’t mind this stuff, it’s just the studying that sucks.”

“I know, Beau,” Caleb replies. This isn’t the first time they’ve talked about having complicated relationships with school. Both of them love learning, but Caleb has always been better suited for the way learning happens in a class setting than Beau has. She doesn’t do well with all the formality, the rules and the authority. Beau would be lying if she said she wasn’t a little miffed at her own inability to study for tests like a normal person, but she knows Caleb would tell her that she was being dramatic, that she was doing fine, and that normality is relative, anyway.

She still lets her head rest on the desk with her face pressed into the pages of her open history textbook, hoping that maybe the information will pass into her brain through contact with her forehead and sheer force of will. “This sucks.”

“I know,” Caleb says again. “But you are doing well so far.”

“I’m gonna fail.”

“You are not going to fail, Beauregard. How many major romance languages are there?”

“Five.”

“What are they?”

Beau groans. “I have no fucking idea, Caleb. I’m screwed.” 

She feels him bap her softly on the back of the head with his own book. “Get up. You are laying on top of the answer.” 

She groans again and sits up off of her poor history textbook, combing through the pages of bland text about linguistics to find the section on romance languages. “Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian, and Romanian.” 

“Good,” he says. “Repeat it. Without looking at the book.”

“Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian...Romanian?”

“See? You are not screwed.” Caleb gives her a small smile, which makes her think she isn’t doing nearly as well as she should be, considering the test is in twenty minutes. 

“Do we have to know how many people speak each language?”

Caleb coughs instead of answering. Beau groans again, leaning back in her chair.

***

Yasha wants to go to game night, is the thing.

Obann is working today, so he can’t pick her up during lunch and take her to get something off-campus. She finds a granola bar and some chips stuffed into the bottom of her backpack and decides that this will suffice, but she would very much rather not eat in the cafeteria or in the courtyard, at a table all by herself--if she could even find an open seat.

She doesn’t  _ not  _ like to read. So she sits in the library, and eats her food surrounded by books, curled into an armchair hidden away from the busier central area of the room. 

She wants to go to that cafe, and play games with them. She knows it’s stupid, and that they haven’t been friends in a while, but there’s a little girl inside of her who just misses them--misses  _ having  _ friends at school.

Beau sent another text, minutes after she saw her in the hallway on her way to class, and Yasha doesn’t know how to answer it, because the logical adult side of her and the childish lonely side of her are in the middle of an argument. The logical adult side sounds like Obann and reminds her that they were the ones who pushed her out--that she shouldn’t go crawling back to them and let them have power over her. 

But she wants to go anyway. The childish lonely side is pretty stubborn, she finds.

She finishes her chips and crumples the empty bag in her hand and stands up to find a garbage can. She’s about to turn a corner around a set of shelves when she hears her name and stops short.

“--think of her?”  _ Is that Beau? _

“What do you mean?” Yasha recognizes the slight German accent as Caleb’s. 

“I dunno. Jester invited her to game night. What d’you think would happen if she came?”

“She would play games with us, I hope,” Caleb replies. “You are supposed to be studying, Beau.”

“Okay, but do you think she’d wanna--I don’t know. Talk about it?”   


“I do not know,” Caleb says. “Is there anything to talk about?”

“Are you kidding me, Caleb?” Yasha hears Beau scoff a little. “I mean, you were there, that weekend, everything after it--it was fucked up, what happened to her.” A pause. “And we weren’t exactly helping.”

“Ja,” Caleb says, quietly. “I guess.”

Yasha crumples her empty bag of chips a little more and turns away from the conversation. She’ll find a trash can somewhere else.

***

_ yeah, this is beau. I’m good.  _

_ it was cool to see you this morning, you really should come hang out w us next week _

_ I mean, if you want _

_ The Blooming Grove, right?  _

_ yeah, thursdays @ 7  _

_ I’ll be there _

_ If that’s okay? _

_ yeah dude, I’m sure jester & everyone would love to see you _

_ Okay. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading! Chapter three’s title is from King and Lionheart by Of Monsters and Men. (Next chapter will be a bit longer. I already have it written so expect it next Monday!)  
> Also I haven't been in high school in three years. forgive me


	4. and i press you to the pages of my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this one got away from me, a little bit, so this is a bit of a beast of a chapter, sorry about that! I really am proud of it though, so I hope you like it!  
> cw for Obann being a manipulative asshole. That’s always true but is Very True in this one.

Thursdays are Jester’s favorite day of the week.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that her mother always bakes a batch of cookies on Wednesday nights, and by Thursday morning they are the perfect day-old-cookie consistency to enjoy after she eats breakfast. They’ve had this tradition for as long as Jester can remember, and she hopes it never stops--partially because her mother makes some incredibly bomb-ass cookies, and partially because she loves how happy her mom gets when she bakes. 

The second reason to love Thursdays is that she has art club after school. Jester is the secretary of the art club, a job which mostly entails keeping meeting notes. At the beginning of her tenure in this position, she asked her art teacher, who is also the club supervisor, if she could take meeting notes via doodles, which he told her was a fantastic idea. Once, she would've been worried about the other officers not taking her seriously, but it’s  _ art club _ , and  _ drawing  _ the notes instead of writing them is a much more creative and interesting use of her time. So who cares?

The third reason to love Thursdays is, of course, game nights. 

Caduceus’s family, he and his parents and his handful of older and younger siblings, moved to town during their sophomore year of high school, to start operating the Blooming Grove Coffee & Tea Shoppe, the quaint establishment that Fjord’s foster moms used to run before they retired. That’s how they met him--Fjord and Caduceus started bonding over working in the shop, Fjord invited Caduceus to come hang out with his other friends, and the rest is history. It was Caduceus’s idea to bring game nights, a tradition that they had, at that point, only just started, to the Blooming Grove. Before that, they’d been bouncing between everybody’s houses, and sometimes people would forget which house they were supposed to go to that week, and it was a whole big thing. This, Jester knew, would be way simpler.

They play a lot of board games. Jester has a huge collection of them at home that she used to play with her mom when she was younger, and because she’s had so much practice, she is pretty much the best at all of them. There’s also card games. Fjord and Nott favor poker, blackjack, and a bunch of other games you play with a traditional deck of cards. Jester prefers The Traveler’s Guidance, the card game that she made up with Beau’s help last year. The illustrations on the cards were part of her Art III final project. Frustratingly, no one else wants to learn to play it, but it works just fine as a two-player game, so no matter. 

Sometimes they play video games. The Blooming Grove has one sort-of-kind-of-really old television set in it, and when they plan ahead for it, Fjord will bring over his Xbox and hook it up and they’ll play something on that. Jester also likes to bring her slightly dated Wii U with MarioKart on it, and they have  _ very  _ intense tournaments. Caleb is, for no particular reason,  _ stupid  _ good at MarioKart, despite the fact that he claims to have little experience playing the game. Jester’s onto him. She’ll beat him out one of these weeks. 

_ This  _ week is, in fact, a MarioKart week, and that would be exciting enough in and of itself, but Jester is extra excited--waiting in an armchair by the windows at the front of the Blooming Grove a full thirty minutes early, even--because she hopes that Yasha will be here tonight.

She hung out with Beau over the weekend, who finally told her about her text conversation with Yasha. Yasha said that she would be here, no maybes, no uncertainty.

Jester is excited! She’s excited.

(She is, also, a little bit nervous.)

It’s raining outside, already after dark. Caduceus comes over to where she’s curled sideways in her chair, watching out of the windows, and leans down to clear the crumb-covered plate she’d anxiously devoured a donut off of minutes before.

“Looks like it’s gonna storm,” Caduceus says, craning his neck to try to look at the sky from inside the shop. 

“You don’t think the power will go out, do you?” Jester frowns, but secretly, she thinks it would be kind of cool if it did. Power outages during thunderstorms are always so cozy--all the candles, and cuddling up under blankets for warmth, and telling spooky stories around a flashlight--well, maybe that one’s more about camping. She’s always wanted to go camping. Could they go camping next summer, after graduation? That would be fun.

“I doubt it,” Caduceus says, dragging Jester back to reality. “But if it did, we’d have to cancel game night.”

“What? And send us all home in the rain? We could just stay here, couldn’t we?” Jester says, then immediately rethinks it. “Except--I guess not everyone has parents that would be super chill with that, huh?”

“Fjord’s mothers know us, I think they’d be okay.”

“Yeah, but, like, Beau, and stuff.”

“Oh. Yeah, good point.”

“And what about Yasha?”

“What about her?” Caduceus leans against the back of Jester’s chair. She glances outside again, but no one is here yet. 

“What if she comes tonight and the power goes out and she can’t get home? Won’t her mom worry?”

Caduceus’s brow furrows. “She doesn’t live with her parents, I thought? Fjord told me she was kicked out.”

Jester feels a pulse of embarrassment, having forgotten, and something else--a familiar feeling of secondhand pain for Yasha’s situation. “Oh, yeah. So, I guess not. Hm.” 

“For what it’s worth, I think your mom would be super cool with it,” Caduceus says after a minute. Jester smiles at him.

“Yeah, my mom’s pretty cool.”   
  


The bell over the door to the Blooming Grove rings, drawing Jester and Caduceus’s attention to a sopping-wet Beauregard, who starts peeling off layers of sweater, hoodie, and scarf as soon as she’s through the door. Jester brightens and waves her over.

“Sorry, I know I’m early,” Beau says. “It’s just--football nights, you know?”

Caduceus nods like he knows, but Jester thinks he barely knows what football even is. Fjord and Nott were throwing one around, once, last summer, in Fjord’s backyard, and at one point it landed in front of Caduceus, who just picked it up and examined it like it was a particularly interesting plant, or something. Jester, on the other hand, went over to Beau’s house, once, during a Football Night, so she knows that Beau’s dad has a dozen of his loudest, rowdiest friends over on Football Nights. The noise of a ton of men shouting makes Beau antsy and uncomfortable.

“It’s okay, now you can hang out with us!” she says, trying to squash the ever-increasing urge to spray-paint dicks on the side of Beau’s dad’s car. 

Beau starts wringing rainwater out of her ponytail and takes a heavy seat in the armchair across from Jester’s. Caduceus moves away, probably to get Beau a pastry or tea or coffee without even being asked, because that’s just kind of how Caduceus is around them, now. 

“How was art club? How’s the project going?” Beau asks, and Jester grins. Beau always seems to know when she wants to gush, and asks just the right questions to allow her to do so. It makes her heart feel fuzzy and warm and understood.

“It was really good! We finally got the permit from the school to do our mural,” Jester says. “It’s gonna be on one of the outside walls by the courtyard.”

“Woah, really? That’s a great spot. Lots of foot traffic.”

“Isn’t it?” Jester stretches her arms out above her head and lays fully sideways across the chair, trying to get comfy. “I just hope it’s worth all the fighting with school administration to get the dang permit in the first place. It’s like they don’t respect art at all, Beau.”

Beau snorts. “I’m not surprised. Bunch of old white dudes who have been running a school full of teenagers for way too long? Of course they don’t appreciate real fuckin’ art.” 

Jester laughs, and Beau smiles at her as she does. They chat idly for another fifteen minutes or so, during which time Caduceus returns with a cannoli for Beau, until the bell over the door rings again, and Nott and Caleb shuffle in.

Jester gasps at Nott’s highlighter-yellow raincoat. “Is that new?”

Nott smiles, a little sheepishly, and glances down like she forgot it was there. “My dad got it for me,” she says. “You don’t think it’s too tight? Or--obnoxious?”

“It looks adorable on you, what are you talking about?” Jester motions for her to turn in a full circle, and Nott complies. “It’s so stylish!”

“Looks great,” Beau contributes, and Caleb smiles slightly and nods. Jester’s sure he probably has already been through this conversation with her when he picked her up to drive her here. Caduceus gives a quiet round of applause.

“Thanks, you guys,” Nott says. “But it’s, like, super warm in here, so can I take it off now?”

“Coat rack is by the fireplace,” Caduceus says like they haven’t all been here a bajillion times. Nott strips off the coat and her scarf and gathers up Caleb’s weather gear as well to hang them over by the fire. 

“Where is Fjord?” Caleb says. “It is 6:58 already.” 

“I’m here, I’m here,” Fjord calls as he bundles through the front door, shaking an umbrella out onto the porch and ditching it there. “Fuckin’ rain, I tried to drive and almost crashed the van.”

“But you made it,” Caduceus says. “And that’s good.”

“Yeah, sure is. It’s MarioKart tonight, yes?” 

“I already got the Wii U set up, all by myself, you’re welcome,” Jester sing-songs. “But we’re going to wait for Yasha!”

“Is she coming?” Fjord says, his brow furrowing slightly.

“Yes! She said she was. Right, Beau?” Jester points to the girl in question for support here.

“She did actually say she was gonna be here,” Beau shrugs. 

There’s a flash of bright lightning, followed almost immediately by a loud crack of thunder, close enough that Jester _eeps_ \--but the Blooming Grove’s lights don’t flicker. Jester gasps, though, when she spots the large figure standing just outside the cafe. 

There, framed in the doorway, illuminated by the light from the street lamps outside, with her wet hair plastered against her forehead, and only a scant few minutes late, is Yasha.

***

On the way home from school on Thursday, Yasha is tense. 

She’s pretty sure that throughout the week, she’s done an okay job at hiding her nerves from Obann, but she isn’t sure. For as long as she’s known him, he’s always been good at reading her, even when she doesn’t want him to. 

Sometimes, she wishes she had someone to talk to  _ about  _ Obann. She hates high school--hasn’t had friends there in years--and even though Obann throws a lot of parties in his apartment, and has a lot of his own friends, it sometimes feels like she only has him. Maybe that’s why she wants to go to this stupid game night. Maybe she just wants something that’s  _ hers.  _

She really is acting like a selfish little kid. 

She hasn’t told him she’s going because she isn’t quite sure how to. He’ll be mad. He’ll think it’s ridiculous that she even considered it, and he’s probably right--he hasn’t steered her wrong yet. She got kicked out of her house, lost her girlfriend and her best friend in one fell swoop, and all her other friends stopped inviting her out to things. To their game nights. They made new friends--the tall, pink-haired boy in their year who looks older than Yasha but also younger, somehow, the one who hosts the game night she’s going to in the first place. Because she’s crawling right back to them like none of it ever happened. 

Stupid. Childish. 

“Yash, what is up with you?” Obann snaps her back to reality and she blinks, hard, and notices that her leg is bouncing up and down erratically in the passenger seat of Obann’s car. “I haven’t seen you this nervous in ages.”

She digs her nails into her own thigh to get herself to sit still. “It’s nothing.”

“Cleary, it is not,” Obann says. “Talk to me, Yasha. I’m here for you.”

Something winds tight in her chest. She lies.

“I’m thinking of calling my brother,” she says quietly, and she stares pointedly out the window despite the way her heartbeat spikes when Obann starts to pull over on the side of the road.

There’s a hand on her other leg now. “Look at me, Orphanmaker. C’mon.” 

She squeezes her eyes shut for a minute, embarrassed at the nickname. He only brings it out to tease her--an old, overly edgy screenname from the chatting app where they’d first met. But she turns to face him eventually. He looks serious.

“You know why you shouldn’t do that,” he says gravely. He’s only ever this serious when she mentions reaching out to her mom, her brother, her old friends. When she mentions paying a visit to Zuala or Mollymauk. 

“I know.” Her voice is weaker than she wants it to be. 

“Don’t you think that if he really cared, he would have called by now?” 

“I know.”

“You’re doing just fine without him,” Obann says. “You don’t need him.”

_ But I want him,  _ she thinks. She crushes the thought. She’s acting like a kid again. Obann is right, and she knows it.

“I know, Obann.”

“Good.” He starts the car up again, and Yasha exhales a little without the momentous weight of the confrontation on her shoulders. “If you ever need to be reminded, I’m always happy to help. You know that.”

Yasha doesn’t say much else, until they’re nearly to his apartment.

“There’s a study group for my math class tonight at the library. Do you think I should go?”

He side-eyes her a little oddly, which is fair. She doesn’t get out much, even to study. “Sure, I guess. I can drive you.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I know you and Ganex are going to the bar tonight. I’ll walk.” 

“Fair enough. You’ll be back by eleven?”   


“Of course,” she says. She doesn’t want him to worry.

They go home. She gets away with it, and feels horrible, and debates herself on how to make it up to him the entire walk to the Blooming Grove. It’s far--farther than she expected, made all the worse by the fact that the rain is pouring down around her, and because it’s November, the sun goes down a full hour before she even leaves. She tries to get there early, but winds up late, instead. She stands frozen, in the doorway, her hair and clothes fully soaked through, and unsure how to enter the Blooming Grove like a normal person.

Jester saves her by jumping out of her seat and rushing to open the door to let her inside. She ducks out of the way of Jester’s arms reaching towards her for a hug. “I’ll get you wet,” she says, smiling a bit nervously. Jester’s smile falters, but only for a second.

“We’re so glad you’re here!” Jester says, and Yasha glances to the rest of the people gathered in this cafe. There’s Beau, sitting in an armchair, with Nott’s small frame is straddling the armrest. Caleb is leaning up against the back of it. Fjord stands a few feet away, taking off his coat. The less familiar face, which must be Caduceus, is a lanky guy holding a tray of snacks and a teapot. He’s wearing an apron with the Blooming Grove logo printed on it, and Yasha didn’t know it was possible for an apron to be so overlarge on a person.

“Hi,” she says, awkwardly. There’s a beat of silence that Yasha feels down to her toes.

Fjord is the one who breaks it. “Should we start playing?”

“YES,” Nott shouts, racing across the room towards a lit fireplace with an old TV to one side of it. Yasha startles as she passes, shaking a bit of rainwater off Yasha’s hair and jacket. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, looking down to the puddle around her feet on the cafe’s carpet. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Caduceus says. His voice, on its own, is strangely soothing. “Let me run upstairs, I’ll grab you a dry sweater.”   
  
“You don’t have to.”

“Nonsense,” Caduceus says, already setting down his tray. “Go hang up your stuff by the fire.”

“Yasha, you ever played MarioKart 8?” Beau fills the space that Caduceus leaves behind as he ambles away towards the back of the cafe’s main room. 

“I can’t say that I have,” Yasha says.

“It’s  _ super  _ fun,” Jester adds, “but only four people can play it at a time, which is lame.”

“You wanna watch for a bit?” Beau asks. “I think Fjord and Nott have already claimed their spots, and I’m sure Caleb and Jes want a turn. I can help you figure it out, if you want.”

“Caleb is going DOWN!” Jester says. “Save me a remote, Nott!” 

“Alright,” Yasha says, softly. Beau looks between her and Jester with a smile full of fondness completely unfamiliar to Yasha. She lets herself be led over to where everyone is crowded around the TV, and she tucks her jacket onto the coat rack as they start their first round of the game. 

Caduceus brings her a dry sweater, as promised, seemingly warm and fresh from the dryer. It fits her, barely. He tells her it’s his sister’s. She thanks him profusely. 

She sits awkwardly, at first, on one end of a couch, with Jester, Caleb, and Fjord spread along the rest of it. Nott and Beau are on the floor, with Nott beneath Jester and Beau nearer to Yasha. Caduceus keeps them supplied with pastries and drinks the whole time. Beau makes commentary on the races as they go, pointing out to Yasha whenever one of the players makes a mistake, which earns her a throw pillow or two to the face from Nott. Yasha tries not to laugh. 

As one hour starts to grow into two, it gets easier. The arrangement of the couch shuffles a few times, and Beau takes Caleb’s place in the race after his fifth consecutive win gets him kicked out. Yasha manages to relax. Her hair starts to dry. The fire is warm. 

It’s a little overwhelming, to be here. She isn’t quite sure how to handle it, the environment of easy familiarity that she doesn’t  _ quite  _ fit into, but that she doesn’t  _ not  _ fit into, either. At one point during the third lap of a particularly intense race, Jester winds up half in Yasha’s lap. Yasha leans so far back on the couch she’s practically falling off of it, and prays that no one notices her blush. Her heart races for minutes afterwards. 

It’s Beau who finally convinces her to join the game. The couch has shuffled it again, and Jester, now a spectator so that Caduceus can join in, is laying across the couch, pushing everyone but Beau and Yasha to the floor. Her legs are across Beau’s lap, her feet barely reaching Yasha’s legs. 

Beau holds a free remote out to her with a raised eyebrow and no words. Yasha takes it. Beau sets the game to an easier speed setting without asking Yasha, who is privately thankful, because she isn’t sure she could handle the high-speed races she’s been observing all night. 

Yasha doesn’t  _ totally  _ suck at MarioKart. She beats Caduceus, at least, but she isn’t sure how big of a feat that is, considering that Caduceus comes in tenth place overall. He seems content to take a pacifist route when he races, which, while noble, Yasha thinks may not be the very best strategy for winning at the game. 

She finds herself getting louder, as she races, doing more shouting when a red shell hits her and laughing at Jester’s frankly silly brand of commentary. When the first set of four races ends, she remembers herself, remembers that she isn’t  _ really  _ apart of this group, and takes a deep breath before handing Caleb her remote. 

After another round, Jester steals Fjord’s remote from him to jump back into the fray. “I’m going to beat Caleb,” she says, “and I don’t even care if I get first!”

Caleb says nothing. Yasha sees his face twitch into a slight smile, though.

What follows is, by far, the most tense set of races of the night. Caduceus...well, Caduceus continues his unbothered playstyle, and while Beau is a good racer, the real spotlight is on Caleb and Jester, who spend the vast majority of each race neck and neck. 

Jester takes the first race, with Caleb in second. Caleb wins the next one, with Jester on his heels. The third race is difficult. Caleb barely snags first place, but Jester gets cut off by a CPU at the finish line with a particularly nasty red shell, swinging into third. Jester breathes out sharply through her nose.

“It’s fine. It’s fine! I can still win this!” 

Beau finishes fifth. “Yeah, you got this, Jester.”

A minute later, Caduceus finds his way over the finish line and the scores appear. Caleb sits at 42, with Jester trailing at 37. 

“I just have to get first, and then Caleb has to get fourth,” Jester says, counting on her fingers, “which is totally possible. These CPUS are mean!”

“I am also playing,” Beau says. “Do you want me to be mean to Caleb?” 

“No! I can’t cheat! It has to be an honest win, Beau,” Jester says, shaking her head. Beau laughs. 

“Maybe I’ll just be mean to Caleb anyway.” Beau earns herself a gentle whop from Caleb with a discarded throw pillow for her troubles. 

The last race begins. It’s  _ tense.  _ It is also nearly silent for the first time all night, as everyone focuses intently on the action.

It isn’t looking good for Jester for most of the race. Caleb holds an unsteady first, falling into second to CPUs occasionally, but Jester gets stuck in the fifth-through-second range and takes a lot of shell hits, and bananas, and boom boxes, and a hit from one stray bob-omb.

Yasha glances to Caduceus’s corner of the screen, where he sits in eleventh holding an unused item. It’s a blue shell, Yasha realizes. She looks to Caduceus on the floor and finds him glancing between Caleb and Jester with a small smile.

He presses the button to release the shell.

On the last corner before the finish line, the blue shell finds its mark. Caleb has no defense against the hit, which also takes down the CPUs in second and third. Jester races into first at the last second with a well-timed mushroom speed boost, and Beau, in fifth, seals Caleb’s fate with a red shell. The CPUs race past him, followed by Beau, who finishes fourth.

Before the race is even over, Caduceus still making his way to the end of the track, Jester is up out of her seat and shrieking with joy. She pulls Beau up off the couch and dances around the cafe with her, both of them laughing. She hugs Beau and Fjord and Nott and Caduceus, who finally ambles over the line, and even Caleb, who seems too enchanted by Jester’s excitement to be upset at his own loss.

Yasha is enchanted, too. She feels a little bit like she’s seeing something she shouldn’t be allowed to--like this much happiness cannot possibly exist in one room, especially one that she’s in. She doesn’t deserve to witness the force that is a happy Jester. 

Jester doesn’t seem to notice Yasha’s apprehension as she pulls her to her feet and wraps her in the tightest hug Yasha’s felt in years--in her whole life, really. Yasha, despite her better judgment, hugs back. 

She catches Beau’s eye while she’s being hugged, and what she sees there is deeper than enchantment. Beau glances at Jester and her cheeks tint red, and Yasha thinks,  _ oh.  _

She gets it. She hasn’t looked at anyone else like that herself since Zuala, but she gets it, because Jester is a whirlwind--a powerful, beautiful whirlwind. Who could blame Beau? 

Jester’s victory tour around the room is interrupted by a massive crash of thunder and lightning outside the cafe, which sends the lights flickering ever so slightly. Jester rushes to take a photo of the screen showcasing her victory in case the power sends it into darkness, and when she does it’s to another round of cheers. 

Jester turns to face Yasha again and looks like she’s about to say something when, suddenly, her face pales, her eyes set to something past Yasha’s shoulder. 

Yasha turns to see whatever spooked Jester, and her stomach plummets through the floor.

Because just inside the cafe’s front door, with his face carefully blank and his raincoat dripping from the storm, stands Obann. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, once again, for reading! I had a lot of fun with this one. Chapter four’s title is from Want You in My Room by Carly Rae Jepsen. (Shoutout to firbolg_boyfriends for having a killer Jester playlist that I listened to while writing this.) Also, can you tell how much time I spent playing MarioKart with my sisters over winter break?
> 
> It might be a little while before the next update because I haven't been able to get much writing done with school starting up again, and also because I want to be particularly careful to get the next chapter just right. Hopefully it'll be next Monday but we'll see! Until then, stay safe and warm, friends!


	5. tell me it was a mistake (tell me how your heart breaks)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI, I AM not dead! It is, as I write this note, 11:27 PM on Monday in my timezone which means that I officially got this up on MONDAY but barely. Woot!   
> Sorry about the brief hiatus, but I hope that you enjoy this chapter!  
> Content warnings for arguments, MENTIONED ONLY threats of physical violence, and getting kicked out.

When Yasha follows Obann out of the front door of the Blooming Grove, she leaves behind a heavy awkwardness that crushes the last bits of joy from Jester’s win over the long-reigning MarioKart champion. 

Not that she’s mad at Yasha for stepping on her moment, or anything. Of course she’s not. If she’s mad at anyone, it’s Obann. They’re still outside, she knows--she watched them walk to the side of the building, and wishes she could hear what they’re saying, but she can’t. 

It’s getting late anyway, so Caduceus starts to clean up, and everyone else follows his lead. Jester can’t seem to focus, though. She keeps thinking about Yasha, out there, alone in the rain with Obann, and she feels a little sick to her stomach. She’d thought Yasha was having fun--she was having fun, right? 

“Do you think she’s gonna be okay?” Jester finds Beau leaning up against the wall, checking her phone for texts. 

“What? Yasha?” Beau slips her phone into her pocket. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“She looked like she was in trouble!”

“He’s probably just here to pick her up,” Beau says, frowning.

“Then why didn’t they get in his car, Beau?” Jester is a little frustrated that no one else seems to share her distrust of Obann. “They’re still just out there!”

Beau glances to the front windows of the cafe. “I don’t know, Jester.”

Jester glances outside, too. “I want to go listen.”   


“Jes, no, you can’t--violate their privacy,” Beau says. “They’re  _ friends,  _ we don’t know that anything’s wrong.”

She pouts. “Yeah, but what if it is? Don’t you care?”

“Of course I care, Jes,” Beau says seriously. “But it isn’t our place.”

“Then whose place is it?” Jester pauses. “I’m going out there. Just for a second! I just need to know if he’s yelling at her, okay? If he’s not I’ll leave right away.”

Beau calls out to her, but she’s already walking away. “What if he is? Jester!” 

She pulls on her favorite green raincoat and slips out the front door as quietly as she can manage. It’s still pouring down rain, but the alleyway to the right of the Blooming Grove is partially covered. She bets she’ll find them there.

She does her best job to sneak around the side of the building. She’s not as small as Nott or as dexterous and athletic as Beau, but she manages, and ducks behind the side of a dumpster once she spots Yasha and Obann. Yasha doesn’t even have her coat on. She must be cold.

“--the hell would you do this, Yasha?”

“I’m sorry.” Yasha speaks so softly Jester can barely hear her.

“I deleted those texts because I knew they wouldn’t be good for you to see,” Obann says. 

“You--what?”

“The other day, during that party, when you went to the bathroom,” Obann explains. “You left your phone on the table. You got a text from an unknown number asking you to come here. To the Billowing Grove, or whatever, and I fucking deleted it, because you don’t deserve that.”

Jester wishes she could see Yasha’s face, but mostly she just feels  _ angry _ . That was _ her  _ text, that she sent Yasha, and Obann deleted it without even letting her see it. No wonder Yasha had seemed so confused.

“I asked you to stop going into my phone,” Yasha says after a beat of silence.

“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t, because what do you know, you started texting them  _ again _ !” Obann is halfway to screaming, and Jester flinches a bit where she’s crouched behind the dumpster.

“I’m sorry,” Yasha says again.

“Does my help mean nothing to you?”

“No, no, it does--it means a lot. You were right.”

“Yeah, like I can trust that. You’ve been doing nothing but lie to me all week, Orphanmaker.” He practically spits the nickname. Jester remembers Yasha using it as a username on social media way back when they were in middle school. Why does  _ he  _ get to say it, and like  _ that _ ?

“I’m sorry, I really am,” Yasha says, and “You were right. It’s--can we just go?”

“Oh, I was right, huh? Whose fucking sweater is that, Yash?” 

Silence. Then, quietly: “Please, don’t be mad.”

“Oh, I’m well past mad, Yasha. I opened my home to you and this is how you repay me?” She hears a scuffling noise, and Jester feels her heartbeat spike higher as she wonders if he’s going to hit her, but there’s no follow through. “You know what? If you  _ love  _ your new friends so much and just  _ hate  _ me, and you’re borrowing their  _ clothes  _ and getting all comfortable, why don’t you stay with them, instead?”

“Obann, what are you--”

“Don’t fucking follow me. Don’t come home tonight,” Obann says, “or you’ll regret it. Go back in there. Tell them how you really live. See how they treat you.” 

“No, please--I don’t have anywhere to go--and the storm--”

“You should have thought about that before you went behind my fucking back. Ungrateful ass.” Jester hears him walk away--and then she makes herself very small as he suddenly passes her on his way out to the parking lot, where he gets into his car and pulls away. He doesn’t seem to notice Jester, and sure enough, Yasha isn’t with him.

Jester hears a soft thud from the other side of her hiding spot. Carefully, she stands up, praying her knees won’t pop, and peeks over the dumpster’s edge. 

There’s Yasha, still in Clarabelle’s soft purple sweater, sitting up against the outer wall of the Blooming Grove, with her head in her hands. Her shoulders shake minutely. Jester knows that she’s crying. 

Her heart breaks in two. 

She forgets to be stealthy, and Yasha’s head snaps up, her eyes meeting Jester’s. She looks hopeful, for just a second, and Jester realizes that she was probably hoping she was Obann, come back to tell her it was all just a joke. 

“Oh, Yasha,” Jester says, voice gentle, but Yasha’s already pulling herself up to her feet and peeling off the sweater. She throws it to Jester as she practically runs out of the alley, into the rain, into the night.

“Yasha!” Jester calls after her, racing into the parking lot. “Where are you going?” 

If Yasha hears her, she doesn’t show it. She just charges off into the storm. Jester stops short in the parking lot, drenched from the rain, still clutching the sweater in her hands. She feels sad. Sad, and angry, and her fingers tighten in the purple fabric unconsciously, and she’s two seconds from running after Yasha again, or maybe tracking down Obann’s stupid fucking car and beating the shit out of it and maybe slashing his tires, too, when a hand comes down on her shoulder.

“Jes,” Beau says, desperately. “Jester, are you okay? What happened? Where’d Yasha go?”

In the end, Jester doesn’t run after Yasha or Obann. She just bursts into tears, instead. 

***

At nearly midnight, Fjord’s van pulls back into the parking lot of the Blooming Grove.

The rain has quieted to a gentle pattering, and the lights inside the cafe have dimmed. Fjord can barely see the outline of Caduceus’ pink hair from behind as he steps out of the driver’s seat of the van and hurries over to knock on the door. Caduceus glances over, sees him, and rises to let Fjord inside.

“How did it go?” Caduceus says, holding out an arm for Fjord’s coat. Fjord peels it off and hands it to him gratefully.

“We couldn’t find her,” Fjord says. “I took them home.”

Caduceus hums thoughtfully. “She left her jacket here. I’ll try to wash it for her.” Fjord watches him move towards the coat rack and the fireplace and gently search through Yasha’s jacket for a tag with washing instructions, and he smiles to himself.

“What do you make of all that?” Fjord asks quietly. “Of her?”

“Oh,” Caduceus says, “I’m not quite sure yet. But I do think that she needs help.”

For something that Fjord has been avoiding letting himself think, Caduceus says it so easily. It’s hard not to believe him, when he says things like that. “Help,” Fjord says, thoughtfully.

“Well, sure.” Caduceus folds Yasha’s jacket over his arm gently. “People have different thresholds for needing help. And the help they may need is different, too.”

“So what do you think Yasha needs?”

“I’m not sure,” Caduceus says, leaning back against the wall to look towards the ceiling. “But if I had to guess, based on what you told me, and what Jester said, I think she needs something material.”

Fjord moves to stand next to him, soaking in the last bits of heat from the dwindling fire. Caduceus rolls his neck slightly to look over at him with a gentle smile. It almost makes him forget what he was going to say, but only almost. “Material, like--support via--” --he gestures in the air in front of himself randomly-- “--via...objects? Things?”

“A place to stay, clothes on your back,” Caduceus clarifies, “that sort of thing.”

There’s a minute where they’re just looking at each other with nothing to say, before Fjord breaks the eye contact and clears his throat. “Have you ever heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?”

Caduceus just tilts his head curiously, so Fjord carries on. “It’s, like, this pyramid shape.” He draws a triangle in the air with his fingers, traces his hands upwards as he explains. “And at the bottom are things like shelter, food, water. The things that you need just to stay alive. And as you go up the pyramid they get more...complex, like relationships with others, and at the top is this thing called self-actualization, which is, like, fulfilment?”

“But you need the things at the bottom to get to the ones at the top,” Caduceus says. “I think I remember something like that. Very applicable.”

“You reminded me about it. You think she’s at the bottom? Trying to fulfill the basic physiological needs?”

“I do,” Caduceus says, running a hand along the leather of Yasha’s jacket where it’s draped over his forearm. “She doesn’t seem to have a consistent place to stay, if tonight was any indication.”

“I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Fjord says, and his voice softens because he means it.

“How are you holding up?”

Fjord glances up to find Caduceus’s eyes on him again, that soft smile turned his way and illuminated by the cafe’s low lights. “I’m sorry?”

“Are you alright? What happened back there was a lot.”

“Oh, I mean--I’m fine.” Fjord does his best to smile back. “I’m more worried about Jester, to be honest. She was quite torn up about it all.”

Caduceus hums thoughtfully and pushes away from the wall, moving to lay Yasha’s jacket across the arm of a plush chair. “I’ll pack up a box of her favorite snacks to take to school tomorrow. And a few for Yasha, too, if I see her.”

Something in Fjord’s chest pangs deeply, looking at him, pink-haired and soft-spoken and so astoundingly selfless that Fjord can hardly believe he exists. He pushes it down, just like every other time, because he knows how dangerous it would be to let it fester like the open wound it is: knows that if he wants to keep basking in this boy’s kindness and his calm, he can never let it show. Knows that Caduceus won’t ever be able to push him away if he never lays all his cards on the table. 

He finds himself gently running his fingers over the charm on his bracelet--not Vandren’s wheel, but the translucent blue crystal resting in a cage of copper wiring. When he first met Caduceus, he didn’t know what to think of him. He’d only just become accustomed to having a family, to having a family in his friends, and he was still in recovery from his injury and all the losses that came with it. The idea of letting someone in close seemed worlds away. But Caduceus was honest and uncomplicated and he reached into Fjord’s heart and his head when things got stuck there and made it all sound so simple. Trusting him was like breathing air instead of water for the first time in months.

And he wasn’t flawless, either. Fjord trusted Caduceus and Caduceus trusted him right back--let him see the vulnerable, embarrassed way he got around his siblings, told him quiet stories about the house that they had lost to fire. Fjord remembers talking him through study guide after study guide for his English class, watched the way Caduceus’s usually so unworried brow furrowed slightly at the prospect of failing--not because school was of any particular importance to him, but because he knew his parents would worry after him. 

Fjord knows the way Caduceus’s hair looks illuminated from behind by golden sunlight on a sandy shore, after a four-hour drive found them on the coast one summer day a few months ago. He knows the sound of Caduceus’s laugh, deep and full and melodic, and knows the sense of pride he feels when he wrenches that laugh out of him.

Caduceus gave him the charm a few months after they’d met, when everything was still a bit touch-and-go, and Fjord leaned on Caduceus to ground him. The crystal had a gentle curve to it, creating a groove perfect for Fjord’s thumb to fit into and rub across in soft back-and-forths. 

“A worry stone,” Caduceus said. “For when you need something to help you relax.” 

The worry stone grounds him, so he doesn’t have to rely on Caduceus  _ all  _ the time. 

Vandren’s pirate ship wheel reminds him that all of this is fleeting, and he should treasure it while it’s here. 

“Are  _ you  _ alright, Caduceus?” he asks after realizing how long he’s been quiet. “I mean--you were right, that  _ was  _ a lot.”

Caduceus looks up at him, almost a little surprised at the question. His face splits into a smile, after only a moment. “I think I’ll be just fine, Fjord. We have someone else to help, now.”

Fjord blinks at his use of the word “we,” but finds that he doesn’t quite dislike the way Caduceus makes him  _ want  _ to help--to be a better person. “I should probably get the van home so my mothers don’t worry.”   


“That you should.” Caduceus approaches Fjord as he comes off the wall and pulls him into a hug. Fjord sinks into it gladly, Caduceus’s gangly physical form strangely soft and welcoming. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” Fjord says when they pull apart from each other. Caduceus nods.

When Fjord climbs back into the front seat of his van and turns up the radio, he spends a minute to press his thumb along the groove of the worry stone. 

All the way home, he thinks about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, thinks about  _ love and belonging _ and his moms waiting up for him at home and the soft twinkle of reddish-brown eyes in dim firelight, thinks about the friendship bracelet with its two charms side by side, two parts of his life joined into one on his wrist.

Maybe, he thinks, Maslow was onto something.

***

Beau breaks her curfew.  _ Severely _ . She sends her mom a text at 11:05 that she won’t be home but that she’s fine, and then turns her phone off and throws it into the mess of her backpack to deal with later. 

“You should go home,” Jester says lamely, when she does. Beau doesn’t say anything or make an effort to leave and Jester doesn’t bring it up again.

They spend nearly an hour driving all over town looking for Yasha, with Jester and Beau piling into Fjord’s van, Caleb and Nott heading out in the car that Beau is 99% sure Caleb borrowed from Essek, and Caduceus staying behind to close down the cafe. They don’t find her. None of them are familiar with the right places, Beau guesses, even those of them who grew up in this town. Jester suggests they hunt down Obann’s apartment to talk to him, but Beau doesn’t even need to meet Fjord’s eyes to know that they both understand what a bad idea that would be.

At 11:30, Caleb texts the group chat that he has to take Nott home and get the car back. At 11:45, Fjord calls it, and drops Beau and Jester off at Jester’s house. Jester’s mother is already asleep when they get there, so they go straight to Jester’s room, and Jester crawls into bed while Beau resolves to find some way to take care of her. 

Here’s the thing: Jester feels every last one of her emotions so, so deeply, and it’s nearly enough to overwhelm Beau when the fullness of Jester’s sadness overtakes her, and Beau’s the only one here to see it.

Here’s the thing: Beau has known Jester for over ten years, and she rarely sees her cry over things that aren’t fictional. Jester wears her heart on her sleeve and buried deep inside her own chest in equal parts. To Beau, it is as beautiful as it is confusing. 

It’s midnight, and Beau is standing in Jester’s kitchen, waiting for the kettle to whistle so that she can make tea. 

“You don’t have to do that,” a soft voice says, and Beau jumps halfway out of her skin, swearing and grabbing for the closest frying pan-slash-improvised blunt weapon, before turning to see Jester, wrapped up in a comforter that she dragged off of her big bed, wiping her eyes in the kitchen doorway. 

“It’s fine,” Beau says. She isn’t sure how to approach...any of what happened tonight, as Jester moves to lean up against the counter near Beau. 

“I’m sorry to keep you out so late,” Jester says. “I hope your dad won’t be too mad.”

“It’s fine,” Beau says again. She doesn’t really care about what her dad thinks right now. She should probably say something else.  _ Say something else, damnit-- _

“I wish that we had found her,” Jester adds, interrupting Beau’s admittedly fairly circular train of thought. Jester isn’t crying anymore--hasn’t been in a while--but she does look downtrodden. “I’m so worried about her, just...out there, alone.”

Beau wants to put a hand on her shoulder. Isn’t sure how to. Doesn’t. “I’m sorry, Jester,” she says instead. “If it helps, I’m sure she’ll figure something out. I mean, it is Yasha, after all.”

Jester sighs. “I knoooow. But it still sucks!”

“It does,” Beau admits honestly. “But there’s nothing else we can do about it tonight.”

Jester’s brow furrows. “He was so mean to her, Beau. Like, he was yelling and I almost thought he was gonna hit her!”

“That’s awful,” Beau says seriously. She hates that she can’t even picture it--Yasha is easily twice Obann’s size. It’s hard to imagine it even when she trusts Jester and knows that it’s true. 

Jester runs a hand through her frizzy curls and groans. “I don’t know what to do. I tried to invite her out because I was afraid he wasn’t being nice to her and it just made it worse! And now she’s got nowhere to go and it’s cold and rainy and it’s all my fault!”

Now  _ this _ , Beau knows the answer to. “It is  _ not  _ your fault, Jes. It’s Obann’s. Okay?”

Jester groans again and it comes out a half-growl. “You’re right. But still, it makes me so  _ angry _ . Like, I could just--just punch him in his stupid face!”

Beau smiles a bit despite herself. “It’s late, but I’m sure your mom wouldn’t mind too much if we used the punching bag in the home gym.”

Jester gasps. “Wait, that’s such a good idea! I can get my laptop and print out his Instagram profile picture or something and tape that on there!”

“Maybe let’s just stick with the punching bag for now,” Beau says quickly, and Jester laughs, and Beau’s so grateful to hear it that she laughs, too, and almost forgets to grab the kettle when it goes off, and her muttered “oh, shit” makes Jester laugh even harder, and then they’re both just laughing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, wrapped up in Jester’s blanket.

After the tea has been brewed, they go up to Marion Lavorre’s home gym, a room with big mirrors on the walls and tumbling mats and a treadmill and, of course, the punching bag. Beau takes Jester’s comforter and curls up in the corner where the two mirrored walls meet and watches Jester beat the shit out of that punching bag, except it’s nearly 12:30 AM and they’re both exhausted and giggly and a little bit tearful and it’s mostly just Jester leaning her whole body into the bag and watching it swing around and laughing so hard that she cries.

Beau knows to her core that she never wants to leave this moment, the infinity of the midnight hour, the softness of the heavy blanket on her shoulders and her best friend spinning around in the middle of the room like a show just for her. And the way they got here fucking sucks, and she knows that Yasha could very well be asleep on a street corner that they missed somewhere while she’s warm and safe inside with Jester, and she knows Jester knows all of this too. 

But there’s the thing, right? For every piece of her that’s sad that Yasha is alone there’s another piece that just wishes Yasha could be here to witness this, wishes that things were easy so that Yasha could just be under this blanket with her and they could  _ all  _ laugh. There is a parallel universe out there, she understands, where they found her and all of this is true. Her heart is as empty as it is full in a way that hearts can only be when it’s after midnight. 

Beau dreams of stormclouds. And if Ms. Lavorre finds the two of them in a pile of blanket together on the floor of the gym the next morning, and they are so late for school and Yasha doesn’t show up to school at all and Beau’s dad nearly kills her when she finally gets back home, then, well. 

That’s future Beau’s problem. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope it was worth the wait! I’m not sure when the next chapter will go up but hopefully it will be soon. Chapter five’s title is from Say Nothing by Gabrielle Aplin.


	6. have you noticed i've been gone?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again! Looks like every two weeks is a better update schedule for me than every single week! Anyway, this is a DAY EARLY (but a week late, so...six days late instead of seven!)   
> ALSO...thank you for over 1k hits and 100 kudos, that’s kind of wacky!!! I’m so astounded that people actually like my silly angsty ramblings...your support keeps me motivated to write regularly for the first time in years <3  
> cw for homelessness, manipulative behavior, more mentions of smoking without any actual smoking

Yasha has to go back to school.  _ Eventually.  _

She spends four nights on the streets, and finds that she’s gotten out of practice since the last time that she had to do this. 

When she first got kicked out, she lived out of her car for a while. It was a beat-up hand-me-down from her brother, a gift from her mom on her 16th birthday, just before everything fell apart, and it was the warmest place she had to sleep. She’d go to school on and off, just for something to do. She’d tried to get a job, but nobody wanted to hire a 5’9” 16-year-old girl with bleached hair and fake tattoos all over her arms drawn in Sharpie who didn’t even have her mom’s permission, and wasn’t emancipated. 

When she gets far enough away from the Blooming Grove to not be feeling immediate panic anymore, she takes stock of what she has. Her phone, thankfully. No charger, though. A thin, but at least long-sleeved, shirt, that she’d been wearing underneath the sweater she gave back to Jester before she ran. Her wallet in the back pocket of her jeans--a literal blessing, she realizes with a sigh of relief, because it means she won’t have to choose between stealing or starving, at least for now. Her keys were in the pocket of the jacket she left behind. It is cold, and wet, and she swears at herself for forgetting it. But she can’t go back.

There was a brief period in between Obann and living out of the car where she had to find places to sleep and shower that wouldn’t kick her out. She spent a lot of time in the town’s public library, in fast-food restaurants downtown. She remembers a handful of alleys and abandoned buildings that made good places to squat. There were shelters, too, but she was a minor then, and she isn’t now, and she doesn’t want to take a chance on it.

She finds someplace abandoned with most of a roof for nights, and kills time in the library during the day, venturing out to Walgreens for a handful of snacks and a blanket and a travel-sized toothpaste and a pair of dry socks. She uses her phone as a flashlight, muffled by part of the blanket to keep from catching anyone’s attention, throughout the night until the battery dies. She puts it on airplane mode and tells herself it’s to save battery life, and not because she’s avoiding any messages.

The thing that gets her through it is knowing that, just like he has every other time they’ve fought, Obann will come back for her.

It’s also the hardest part, because she misses him--his sly smile and quiet laugh when some pretty stranger at a party tells a joke, the way he taps her tattoo to remind her that they’re in this together. When all of this started she tried to convince herself she wouldn’t get attached to him. He was just a soft couch to crash on, someone to help her get back on her feet. 

Yasha flips through a home decor magazine from two years ago for the twentieth time in the local library and reflects on the fact that she never, ever expected in a million years to get a best friend out of the whole deal.

There’s a picture of a little six-year-old-ish girl in this magazine with ruddy red hair scribbling an interesting pattern of rainbows onto a blank white wall with a set of crayons. The article it’s attached to talks about managing cleanliness in houses with little kids, and something about it makes Yasha laugh a little. She realizes dumbly that it’s because the girl looks like Zuala did when she was younger, and while the laughter isn’t sucked out of her lungs completely, it is mostly replaced with a dull ache. She closes the magazine.

On the fifth day, after she’s read more random do-it-yourself books for more random hobbies than she even knew existed (wood carving, photography, penny collecting, gardening, fashion design, something called extreme ironing), she finds an abandoned charger underneath an armchair in the teen books section, and finally revives her phone.

She’s met with a barrage of notifications. There are 24 messages from an unknown number that all go something like,

_ Yasha i’m so sorry!!! _

_ You’re welcome at the blooming grove any time, okay? Caduceus says so! _

_ Or you can come to my house, okay?  _

_ I hope you’re safe _

_ I’m sorry  _

There’s a missed call once a day every day since that first night from the unknown number. A voicemail for each missed call, too. Yasha can bring herself to neither listen to nor delete them, so she does neither.

There’s four messages from this morning that Obann sent. Yasha stops breathing as she opens them--

_ hey im sorry about the other day. _

_ i got so fucked up abt it last night. still hungover _

_ miss u _

_ come home? _

She’s excited. She hates herself for it a little bit, because Obann clearly has been through it in the past few days as much as she has. She gives herself twenty minutes to get her phone to usable levels of charge and to picture the dozens of potential reunion scenarios. 

It’s a half hour walk to Obann’s apartment. A two minute race up the stairs to his door. Thirty seconds of waiting between her knocking and that door opening. 

A hug that lasts four minutes. Crying--mostly him--that lasts an hour. 

He tells her to go take a shower with a teasing, tearful laugh, and as she stands under the spray of the water, she breathes out her first sigh of relief all week.

_ Finally,  _ she thinks,  _ the nightmare is over.  _

***

“We should start a band, you guys!”

It’s Friday--eight days after Yasha stopped showing up for school. Next week is Thanksgiving, and Beau has pretty much given up on getting anything done until after the short break is over, because whatever. She doesn’t have any more tests until December. She thinks. It’s probably fine.

For now, they’re all lying in the field just beyond the school’s courtyard, soaking in the sunlight from a warm November afternoon, and waiting for Nott to finish meeting with her shop teacher so that they can all go to the mall and avoid doing homework for the rest of the day. Beau told her parents she was meeting up with a study group. She’s astounded that they bought it. Fjord has his head pillowed by his backpack, eyes closed. Next to him, Caleb is hunched over a book he’s cradling in his lap, dragging his finger over the lines as he goes. Caduceus is sitting criss-cross-applesauce, his incredibly long legs folded under him, and making crowns and bracelets out of small flowers he picks out of the grass beneath them.

Beau is laying down, too, next to Jester, who sits up as she speaks. The sunlight catches in the blue of her curls and illuminates her freckled face in gold. “C’mon, wouldn’t that be fun? A band! Caleb, you play the piano, don’t you?”

“In middle school,” Caleb says without looking up. 

“You could learn again! Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Caleb glances up at her with a soft smile, tucking a lock of the red hair he never gets cut behind his ear. “Maybe.”

“I have always wanted to learn to play an instrument,” Caduceus says thoughtfully, gently setting a newly finished flower crown on Caleb’s head. Caleb’s nose scrunches up a little, but he keeps smiling anyway.

Jester gasps, turning so that she’s half-laying down again, but on her stomach this time, her hands pushing her torso up to look at Caduceus. “What instrument?”

Caduceus hums. “Maybe the flute?”

“Piano and flute,” Fjord comments from where he’s laying, not opening his eyes. “That’s quite the combination. Very orchestral.”   


“It’s wonderful!” Jester says. “What about you, Fjord?”

“Yeah, what ABOUT you, Fjord?” Nott, who must have snuck up on the group while they were distracted thinking about instruments, drops her backpack on Fjord’s stomach, and he  _ oofs.  _ He swings a hand towards Nott to swat at her, but misses wildly. Nott laughs. 

“D’you even know what we were talking about?” Fjord says to her, finally sitting up. 

“Not a clue,” Nott says, “but answer anyway.”

Fjord huffs and dumps Nott’s backpack into the grass next to himself. “I dunno. Maybe guitar?”

“I think that we should start a band,” Jester says, filling Nott in, “because it would be super fun!”

Nott’s eyes brighten, catching golden sunlight in dark brown irises. “Oh, that  _ would  _ be fun. Could I play drums?”

“Oh my gosh, yes!” Jester claps. “And I could sing, and Beau could--Beau, what do you want to do?”

Beau blinks. “Uh--I have no idea. I mean, maybe I still know how to play violin?”   


“Maybe,” Jester says, rolling over again to look up at the sky. “Hmmm. What if you played guitar, too?”

“You have more guitar energy than Fjord,” Nott says. 

“Hey,” Fjord says quietly. Caduceus pats him on the shoulder. 

“We can both play guitar?” Beau says to Fjord, who rolls his eyes as she holds up a hand for a fist bump. He returns it, and Jester cheers.

Jester and Nott begin to animatedly discuss where they’ll find instruments, if the band teachers would let them use some of their stuff, if they could do it in the Blooming Grove or maybe at Jester’s house or in someone’s garage, like in old movies?

Beau listens to them talk for a while, breathing in the crispness of the air. It’s warm out, but still November warm, so there’s a slight bite to the breeze that feels good in Beau’s lungs and across her skin. She exhales deeply, then--

Across the field, at the edge of the courtyard, she spots a distinctive flash of half-bleached-white hair, and her heart rate accelerates. 

“Hey, I’m gonna go, uh--throw something away real fast. Don’t let anyone steal my stuff,” she says, standing up and brushing grass off of her jeans. She doesn’t wait for them to respond before she walks off across the field at a brisk pace.

She chases Yasha all the way to the secluded outer wall of the gym building, which, at 3:30 pm on a Friday, is completely deserted. She watches Yasha fumble over a lighter and a cigarette for a second before she works up the nerve to approach.

“Hey,” Beau says, smoothly. Yasha, less smoothly, finally lights the cigarette, in the same moment that she startles and it and the lighter clatter to the ground. Yasha swears in what Beau knows must be Russian, which she suddenly remembers she hasn’t heard Yasha speak in years.

“--Beau? What are you doing here?” Yasha says, bewildered. 

Beau sticks her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and tries to play it cool. “‘M chilling.”

“I--okay,” Yasha says, staring at the cigarette on the floor before gently crushing it out with her foot. 

There’s an awkward, heavy moment of silence. Beau realizes that she is not, in fact, chilling. She’s scared--of Yasha? Of Yasha running? She isn’t sure. Her muscles tense, a little, with the nerves, and her thoughts start going a mile a minute, when Yasha suddenly blurts, “I don’t smoke.”

It startles Beau so badly that her thoughts stall. “I’m--sorry?”

“I don’t smoke,” Yasha repeats, pointing at the crushed cigarette. “It’s--I didn’t want you to think that I was, like, a--a smoker, or anything. I don’t even like the smell. But Obann keeps saying it would make me feel better, and I just thought.”   


Yasha realizes she’s rambling and stops, her mouth clicking shut, her mismatched eyes wide and staring at Beau, and, well. Beau laughs.

For a split second Yasha looks a little more panicked, and Beau holds out her arms. “No, I’m so sorry, I’m not--I’m not laughing at you, I just--I don’t care if you smoke, Yasha. I’m not gonna think less of you, or anything.”

“Oh,” Yasha says, her shoulders relaxing. She breathes out a little laugh of her own. “Okay. Thank you.”

“It’s no problem,” Beau says, and whatever tension was there must have been blown away in the breeze, the heaviness of it all lightened by Yasha’s outburst. They both smile at each other, and Beau realizes Yasha must be thinking the same thing, and Yasha looks a little mystified by it. The awestruck way she’s looking at Beau makes Beau fight the reddening of her own cheeks. 

“So,” Beau says, clearing her throat, “how’s your senior year been? We didn’t get to actually do much catching up last week.”

Yasha looks down at the ground again, a little bashful, but the heaviness doesn’t come back, so Beau figures it wasn’t too bad of a question. “It’s been alright,” she says. “I’ve been skipping a lot, though.”

Beau leans her back up against the brick wall of the gym building and kicks at some stones on the ground, watching them fly everywhere. “I feel that,” she responds. “I don’t know if you remember, but I used to get in trouble for skipping constantly.”

“I do remember. It’s probably not the best habit,” Yasha admits. 

“But classes are just...so skippable. Like, school was  _ made  _ to be skipped.” 

Yasha glances up at her with a furrowed brow and a small smile. “What? I don’t think that’s true.”

“No, okay, listen,” Beau says. She has a  _ lot  _ of opinions about this topic. “They don’t even teach us effectively. The SATs and ACTs and AP tests and all those exams they give us in our classes don’t test shit about our actual, like, real-world knowledge or skills or anything, they just measure how good you are at taking an exam. So you’ve put all these people who are really smart, but just don’t, like, learn well in a big room full of kids and one teacher or with all these high-pressure, memorize-this-list-of-seven-dozen-languages tests, at a huge disadvantage. So of course we’re gonna wanna skip. School environments  _ suck _ .”

Yasha’s smile widens a little. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” A pause. “I think I’m just not smart, though.”

Beau huffs a little laugh. “Okay, well, being smart is overrated anyway. You’ve got plenty of other stuff going for you, Yash.”

Yahsa looks away again, her lips pressed together like she’s trying to hold back that smile. In the distance, a collection of grey stormclouds march across the clear blue sky, threatening rain. 

“Hey,” Beau says, breaking the silence. She stares pointedly at the distant stormclouds and not at Yasha. “I, uh--we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t wanna. But, you know. If you do want to. I’m happy to listen.”

Yasha doesn’t say anything for a moment that’s long enough to make Beau wonder if she heard her. Then, “Talk about what?”

“About last week, I guess.” Beau kicks more pebbles. “You kind of ran off really fast. Caduceus has your jacket, by the way. He washed it for you.”

“Oh,” Yasha says. “That’s...nice of him.”

“He’s really nice,” Beau says. 

Yasha sighs. “I’m sorry, Beau.”

Beau snorts, despite herself. “What for?”

“For running off?” Yasha says. “Isn’t that what you wanted to talk about?”

“I--I’m not  _ mad  _ at you about it, Yasha,” Beau insists, finally bringing her gaze to Yasha next to her, who looks genuinely confused. “I’m-- are you, like--”--she gestures wildly into the air around herself, like it will do the talking for her--”--okay?”

“I’m fine.” It’s Yasha’s turn to kick stones at their feet, now. “It’s--Obann and I fight, sometimes. I mean, it isn’t weird, for friends to fight sometimes.”

“Didn’t he, like, kick you out over it, though?” Beau says. “That’s not normal.”

A beat of silence. “I’m lucky he lets me stay with him in the first place. He isn’t asking me for much.”

“Hold on, one second,” Beau says, kicking herself off of the wall so she can stand in front of Yasha. The heaviness isn’t back, but it’s been replaced with something--a live wire that Beau can’t help but grab for. “Where do you go? When he kicks you out?”

Yasha shrugs. “The library.”

“And after that? Do you go home?”

Yasha doesn’t answer, just looks past her at the approaching clouds. 

“Does he know?”

“Does he know what?”

“That you don’t have a place to go, Yasha,” Beau says. She can’t keep some of the heat she’s feeling out of her voice, and Yasha flinches a little. Beau is instantly sorry, but something about the electricity in the air--about having Yasha here, and actually  _ talking  _ about it--is a little addicting.

“He does,” she says, quietly. 

“Then how could he possibly think that that was okay? How do you think that that’s  _ normal _ ?” Beau realizes that she’s yelling, and she backs off a little bit. 

Another beat of silence, then a second, and a third. Something in the air shifts slightly. “I’m sorry,” Beau apologizes, sincere.

“It’s alright,” Yasha says, “and I’m staying with him now. So it doesn’t matter that much anyway.” Beau wants to grab the live wire again and insist that it  _ does  _ matter, and as she tries to figure out what it is about this that’s got her so riled up, she thinks it might be something selfish. Obann has always reminded her a little bit of her dad. Maybe going to bat for someone else’s problems is just easier than dealing with her own. 

Yasha breaks the silence this time, and it feels like an olive branch. “How has  _ your  _ senior year been, Beau?”

“Well,” Beau says, thinking about college applications and scholarship essays and AP classes, “it sure has.” 

Yasha laughs a little bit, and a little bit of the electricity fades. Things get easier, after that. 

They catch up--Beau tells Yasha about Caduceus and Fjord’s obvious pining that’s gotten clearer over the years to everyone but the two of them, and Nott’s ever-growing collection of buttons, and about how Caleb got into a zillion early admit programs at universities all over the country (and in Germany). Beau tells her about Jester’s newly made plans to form a band, the mural she’s working on with the art club, how Marion has been. Yasha doesn’t offer much conversation of her own, so Beau fills the empty space with all the little pieces of her friends that’s she’s collected over the years, spread out between the two of them like a bridge. 

“We’ve been having game nights for about a year and a half, I think,” Beau is saying when Yasha finally speaks up.

“I did really have a lot of fun, last week,” she says, softly, like she’s admitting it to herself, too. 

“That was a good one. Caleb’s been beating ass at MarioKart nonstop for years.  _ Years _ , Yasha.” They laugh. Weirdly, it’s easy. “D’you think you’ll come to any more game nights?”

“Maybe,” Yasha says. “I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m--it was a lot of people, I guess.”

“That’s fair,” Beau says.

“Um, I guess--it might be easier to, hang out one-on-one, you know?” Yasha isn’t looking at Beau, smushing the remains of her old unused cigarette deeper into the concrete with the heel of a combat boot. “So, if you ever wanted to get coffee, or something. Maybe not at the Blooming Grove.”

Beau blinks. “I mean, I know a decent place a few blocks from school, if you wanted.”

“That would be nice,” Yasha replies, her voice quiet. “Uh--maybe don’t text me, though. We could just--plan to meet there? At a time.”

“Uh, sure, I guess?” Beau raises an eyebrow. “How about next Tuesday, right after school?”

“That would be perfect, actually,” Yasha says. She meets Beau’s eyes again, and god  _ damnit,  _ her eyes are two very pretty colors.

“Uh, I should--probably get back, they’re probably waiting for me,” she says, a little hurriedly. Yasha’s eyes widen minutely.

“I’ll see you Tuesday?”

“Yes, absolutely, I will see you Tuesday,” Beau says, backing out of the corner and out of sight. 

When she gets back to the group, they’re already packed up and waiting for her, itching to head to the mall already. She slings her backpack over her shoulder.

“Where the hell did you go? Did you have to throw something away in the auditorium building garbage specifically?” Fjord says, elbowing her slightly. She elbows him back harder and he wheezes and she feels a  _ little  _ bad, but only a little. 

“I got distracted, catching up with a girl from class,” Beau says. “And it’s none of your business anyway!”

Fjord holds his hands up in surrender. They go to the mall, and home again, and when Beau’s parents ask how the study session went, she lies through her teeth as smoothly as silk, rattles off something about homework making her tired, and skips up to her room if only to get away from them. 

Hours later, laying in bed in her pajamas killing time on her phone, it strikes her. One-on-one, and coffee, and  _ that would be perfect, actually,  _ and--

_ Did Yasha just...ask her out on a date? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you so much for reading, it means the world to me! <3 Chapter 6’s title is from Shelter by Porter Robinson and Madeon. See you in a week or two!


	7. i never dreamed of this

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops! Whoops! How many weeks has it been? Please accept my humble offering of fic as an apology. It's not technically a Monday, but CLOSE ENOUGH.  
> (Also, I’ve been noticing some Inconsistencies In My Fic Timeline, so earlier chapters may eventually get some edits! For now though I hope that they’re the kind of thing that’s only bothersome to me?)  
> CW: mentions of death and of homophobia

It’s definitely, 100%, for sure  _ not a date. _

But, Beau realizes, pacing her bedroom, the question making it impossible for her to even play at sleeping, if it  _ were,  _ would she be... _ opposed _ to that idea?

Beau figured out that she was a lesbian--or, at least, that she liked girls--in middle school. Or, maybe, she didn’t “figure it out,” but she definitely had  _ some  _ sort of Gay Awakening around that time. The thing about human sexuality is that there’s very rarely a single starting point for it; it was a bunch of different things: superficial conversations with Jester and Nott about boys that she just didn’t seem to  _ get  _ all the way; the one New Year’s Eve party where they played spin the bottle and when Beau spun it, it landed on some girl named Tori, and they had the briefest, lamest of middle-school kisses, and everyone laughed like they were all in on some big joke, and Beau felt her heart pounding out of her chest for the rest of the night, like she was in danger.

And, well. The Existence of Yasha Nydoorin certainly didn’t hinder the process.

Yasha was older than all of them--she’d been held back a grade--and taller, and very athletic, and back then she had crazy long jet-black hair that was a little bit curly and stood out sharp against her pale skin. Ms. Nydoorin was a cosmetologist, and Yasha would come to school with elaborate braids and ribbons in her curls and Beau thought it would be cool to run her fingers through it, probably. She was soft-spoken and kind and she had two different-colored eyes and one of them was  _ purple  _ and maybe sometimes it made twelve-year-old Beau feel like she was about to combust.

It wasn’t just that Beau thought Yasha was pretty and nice either. Because in middle school, Yasha got a  _ girlfriend _ , and Beau thinks that if, gun to her head, she did have to pick a formal moment of gay realization, it would be her introduction to Zuala.

Zuala was a red-headed girl with a gazillion freckles in the year above them who lived on Yasha’s street and was in their gym class, and she rivaled even Jester in her brightness. She didn’t seem to mind that Yasha was in the year below her or that all of Yasha’s friends were, too, and she fit into their group so seamlessly it was like she’d been there all along. 

And Yasha and Zuala, despite having a very secret relationship, were adorable. When Yasha found flowers outside she’d pick a few and braid them into Zuala’s hair, and Zuala set aside Yasha’s favorite kinds of candy for her whenever she came across any in class. They held hands after school in the music room waiting for the members of their group who were in band to finish up and they stole small kisses from each other when they didn’t think anyone else was looking. Every time Beau noticed some little act of affection, she filed it away in her mind until she had her own library full of the softest things she’d ever witnessed, and something inside of her ached. 

It was a few months into the whole ordeal that it dawned on her, why seeing her two friends in something-like-love was so important. 

Jester was the first person she told, ironically enough. She didn’t quite have the words for it then that she does now, but it was during one of their not-sleepovers, curled up in a mountain of pillows with all the lights off. Beau remembers every second of it vividly. She didn’t know that she would, at the time. 

She asked Jester not to tell anyone, and she didn’t, and for the most part, they went back to being friends who don’t talk about their love lives. But weeks later, she was careless--mentioned it to Jester outside the school bathroom one day, thinking they were alone. And that’s how Mollymauk Tealeaf became the second person ever to know that Beauregard Lionett liked girls. 

(She chased him around the school hallways threatening to beat him up if he told anyone. He cackled, and ran from her, and teased, but Beau wasn’t ever worried, and he never did tell. She came out to the rest of them, in her own time.)

When Beau thinks about eighth grade and her freshman year of high school and the first few months of sophomore year, too, it’s awash with gold. Middle school sucked simply by virtue of being middle school, for reasons Beau could list forever--being forced into band, immense pressure to do well in her classes, that specifically immature middle-school brand of social gossip that always seemed to find its way to her--but mostly she remembers the brighter moments. Yasha and Zuala and flowers in their hair, and being the rowdy teenagers in the movie theater, and having Zuala’s upperclassman friend sneak them into prom in freshman year. 

It’s hard to forget that prom. They challenged each other to wear the weirdest outfits possible, and Beau showed up in oversized basketball shorts and one of those t-shirts that had the basic elements of a tuxedo, but just printed on it. Fjord dressed up as a cowboy. Nott wore a dress made  _ entirely  _ of buttons. Jester stole a dress from her mom that was floor-length and bright red and covered in sequins, plus a feather boa and heart-shaped sunglasses, and she carried around an empty champagne glass all night long. Yasha wore her brother’s hand-me-down leather jacket and combat boots and ripped jeans, and Zuala wore a pillowcase fashioned into a sundress. Molly rocked a period costume with an old-timey fluffy cravat and a full-on cane. Caleb showed up in the same clothes he’d worn to school the day before. They were absolutely kicked out within half an hour of their arrival. 

Afterwards, Beau stole a bottle of wine from her dad’s fancy cellar and Molly produced several bottles of beer from somewhere he refused to disclose and they gathered around the fire pit in Jester’s backyard and it was the first time Beau was ever something-approximating-drunk. She doesn’t remember much of the specifics of the night after that, except that everything was funny and Yasha and Zuala and Jester were all  _ so  _ pretty, but in different directions, and she thinks she might have started to get angry because she couldn’t put that feeling into words. 

The twisted knot of emotions she felt in her gut for Yasha was one of those things that she knew she’d have to deal with eventually. But then there was the accident, and Zuala and Molly were gone, and Fjord was so badly injured he couldn’t walk some days, and Yasha finally told her mother about her girlfriend--the girlfriend that was  _ gone _ \--and her mother kicked her out of the house.

So Beau thinks that, maybe, those feelings didn’t exactly get resolved. Maybe there were just other feelings that got piled on top of them, like old boxes of souvenirs in an attic.

Yasha asking her out on definitely-totally-not-a-date is making those boxes harder to ignore.

She likes Yasha--likes her a lot, really, despite all of the time and space between them, and it’s not as if the past few years haven’t been incredibly kind to her, appearance-wise. But there  _ is  _ one blue-curly-haired factor that demands to be considered.

Beau stops pacing for a second so that she can collapse into her spinning desk chair, flicking on the desk lamp so that she can see the giant bulletin board that takes up part of the wall behind it. The board’s scattered and disorganized state is a testament to Beau’s scattered and disorganized life, but sprinkled throughout it are photographs of her and her friends over the years--a collection of memories held up by thumbtacks. 

There, near the bottom--Beau and Jester as kids, maybe second grade or so, wearing matching t-shirts for a school field trip to the zoo. Beau doesn’t love looking at pictures of herself as a kid, but she loves this one, where they have their arms around each other, little cheeks pressed together, all toothy smiles. 

There, a little further up--Beau and Jester and Molly in the sixth grade. Back when Molly had  _ braces _ , which was an admittedly wild time in their lives. It’s a candid shot that she thinks Fjord took, Jester with her eyes closed and mouth wide with laughter, Beau’s arm reaching over her head to ruffle Molly’s hair. 

There, a touch to the right--the whole group on a school camping trip in eighth grade. Beau and Jester are next to each other on an inflatable bed in the corner with their sleeping bags pulled into their laps, and Jester’s arms are wrapped tight around Beau, who’s looking away from the camera and laughing. 

There, towards the top--a picture of Beau and Jester when they were four or five years old. Jester in a little red metal wagon, seated criss-cross-applesauce and brandishing a rainbow lollipop into the air. Beau’s hands are on the handle of the wagon and she’s pulling it down the sidewalk, tiny and determined. 

When Beau thinks of Jester, she thinks of home. She thinks of sweet candy and late night study sessions and phone calls and sleepovers, of childhood and everything that comes after it. Nobody in the world makes her laugh like Jester does. 

Beau glances out of her bedroom window to the house a few down and across the street, where Jester and her mom have lived since Jester was two years old--as long as Beau has known her. As long has Beau has loved her, Beau thinks, looking back up to the photo of them and the red wagon. 

The way that she feels about Jester was, in a lot of ways, harder to figure out than the way she felt about girls in general. Only Nott knows about it, still, after a desperate and rushed venting session they shared during junior year, and the fact that Nott has kept it a secret is, quite frankly, a goddamn miracle. 

Beau groans and faceplants into the desk. She’s pretty sure that this is supposed to be easy--that she only has enough heart for one girl, you know? But Jester’s smile makes her heart rate go a little fast, a little breathless, and the colors of Yasha’s eyes pull her in like a siren, and  _ damn it _ ,  _ the poetics are not helping.  _

But it’s not a date, this thing with Yasha. How could it be? She knows that Yasha's always been out of her league, and Yasha has other stuff going on, anyway, so she’s probably not even thinking about romance. Beau can just hang out with her like a normal person and go back to pining for her incredibly, unfortunately heterosexual best friend in the meantime. Maybe Yasha can even give her advice on how to deal with it. 

She finally crawls back into bed again at nearly four, pointedly throwing a jacket from her dirty laundry pile over the digital clock on her bedside table so that she doesn’t have to think about how late it is. When sleep at last claims her, it’s to the thought that if her biggest problem is deciding which hot girl in her life she’s going to have a crush on, then she’s probably doing okay. 

***

“Beau is acting weird.”   


“Is this about the date thing again?”

Jester blows a lock of hair off of her face and looks up from her mixed media project to Nott’s side of the table, which is a mess of random trinkets that she has been supergluing to wooden planks for the past week and a half. “I just think it’s weird that she--”

“--that she won’t tell us who she’s meeting with, yes, I know,” Nott finishes for her, attaching a rusted metal pocketwatch to an empty patch of wood. “We’ve been over this, Jessie. She says it’s not a date.”

Jester pouts. “She’s meeting a girl for coffee, Nott!  _ Alooooone.  _ That doesn’t scream date to you?”

Nott sighs and sets down her bottle of Gorilla Glue, meeting Jester’s eyes. “I know for a fact that it is not a date.”

“How? Did she say something to you?” 

Nott flushes red a touch and Jester GASPS. “Oh my gosh, she DID say something to you! What did she say? Won’t you tell me?”

“It’s not for me to tell!” Nott says quickly. “It’s just not a date!”

Jester gasps again, even louder. “Is it not a date because there’s somebody  _ else? _ ”

_ “No, definitely not,” _ Nott replies, glancing over to make sure that the art teacher isn’t listening to them pointedly not working on their current projects. 

Jester groans, unafraid of the art teacher’s judgment. He likes her well enough, so it’s probably fine. “Why won’t she talk to me about this stuff, Nott? We’re best friends!”

Nott pauses. “How come you’re so hung up on it? I mean, if it was a date-- _ and I’m not saying that it is _ \--wouldn’t you, you know, be happy for her?”

Jester frowns, looking down at the pile of paper mache in front of her that she’s trying to turn into something she can submit for a grade. She  _ is  _ happy for Beau! Well, mostly happy. There’s something else, beneath the happy, and she can’t quite figure out what it is, but it doesn’t sit well with her. 

“I just want to make sure she’s not going out with someone weird, you know?” She settles on this answer, and goes back to dipping newspaper strips into glue. “Like, what if she starts dating some total creep? I have to, to--you know! Make sure any potential girlfriends are good enough for my  _ best friend _ ! That’s all.”

“Uh huh,” Nott says, now intently focused on putting glue on the tiny links in the chain of the pocketwatch. “C’mon, you two have known each other your whole lives. She’s not gonna up and replace you.”

Jester hmphs. “Not our  _ whole  _ lives,” she mutters. 

“Sorry,  _ do  _ you remember a time before you knew Beau?”

“No!”

“I rest my case.” 

Jester rolls her eyes. Truthfully, she isn’t sure why it bugs her so much that Beau is suddenly being cagey about things that Jester would normally expect her to share. They tell each other everything, for Pete’s sake!

But maybe they’re getting older. Maybe they’re not kids anymore, and maybe Beau doesn’t want to share everything with her anymore. The thought sits prickly in Jester’s head. She hates feeling like this. 

“I should talk to her,” she says, suddenly, after several minutes of silence have passed. Nott startles and drops her glue bottle and the six-sided die she was affixing to her project. 

“Talk to-- _ who? _ ” she says, a little shrill, grabbing to catch the glue before it rolls off of the large art table. The die lands with a clatter. Nott has rolled a 2. 

“To Beau! About how she’s being weird!”

“Jester, I love you, so very much,” Nott says, “but I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Communication is always a good idea,” Jester says matter-of-factly. “My mom always says so.”

“Yes, well, maybe you should...at least wait...until after she hangs out with the mystery girl,” Nott says. “Hey, you never know, maybe it’ll go super badly and then you won’t have to worry about it anymore!”

“Girls,” the art teacher calls from across the room. “Please, volume down for the moment.”

“Sorry,” Nott and Jester call in unison.

Jester’s voice then drops down to a whisper. “Okay, I will wait, but only because you’re my friend and I trust your judgment and because I totally think you know something about Beau and this mystery girl that I don’t, even though you’re being  _ super rude  _ and not telling me what it is.”

Nott rolls her eyes. “ _ Thank  _ you.”

“HA! So you do know something! You didn’t even try to deny it!”

Nott startles again at Jester’s volume change, her glue bottle flying out of her hand and into a plastic cup full of beads she’d been working with. The cup overturns, spilling beads across the table and onto the floor. Nott swears up a storm as she dives to try to pick up the beads before the teacher notices the mess, and Jester does not swear, but also is not a monster, and rushes to the other side of the table to start scooping beads off the ground. 

For the rest of the class, which is the last class of the day, Jester doesn’t bring up Beau And The Mystery Girl again. But she keeps thinking about it. Even paper mache can’t fully distract her from the thought that in, like, an hour, or maybe even less than an hour, Beau will be getting coffee with some girl that Jester doesn’t even  _ know _ . 

On the way out of school, when she’s sitting in her car in the parking lot waiting for some of the traffic to clear out, she furiously edits a text to Beau, before finally settling on and sending one.

_ I am going to bake a BUNCH of cupcakes tonight and i need my official taste tester to be around will you pleaseee come over after your thing <3 <3 <3 please! _

A few minutes later, when Jester’s still crawling through the parking lot, she gets a reply.

_ literally would not miss a chance to taste test cupcakes for u for the world _

Jester looks down at her phone and smiles. Something in her chest flutters like a butterfly. At least, she thinks, Beau will always be her best friend. No Mystery Girl could ever change that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always for reading and for your patience with me while I try to juggle being a full-time (although now remote, I guess) college student with actually getting any writing done! Chapter 7’s title is from This Love by Taylor Swift.


	8. you woke the world inside of me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Happy Monday! It’s me! I’m back with more fic! Nearly 5k words of it, in fact!  
> This one really got away from me, but I had a good time with it. I’m starting to get to the end of my outline and I’m thinking that this fic won’t be longer than 12-13 chapters or so, so! Yay! Hope you guys enjoy this one :)  
> cw for mentions of Obann being shitty (plus also Beau’s dad being shitty)

The first time they meet up for coffee, Yasha is late.

Or, maybe, Beau is incredibly early. Or, maybe, she’s overthinking, because they didn’t even set a time--they just said that they’d meet after school for coffee. Beau cornered Yasha briefly on Monday to give her the address of the Blue Dot Cafe, a coffeeshop a few streets away from the school that she used to sometimes go to when she needed to stay away from her house, because it’s got kind of good study space vibes. However, she failed to confirm a time, and Yasha hadn’t brought one up, either. 

Beau looks down at the half-drunk cup of coffee that she’d ordered when she first got here. The caffeine, she realizes, is probably not helping her anxiety levels. Whoops.

Finally, after Beau has been sitting at the little table in the corner by the window for over half an hour, Yasha bundles into the cafe. Beau spots her and raises a hand in greeting. Yasha scans the cafe for a second before her eyes land on where Beau’s sitting, and her whole face seems to brighten a degree or two. The little upturn of her lips into a sort-of smile has Beau’s heart going fast. _Keep it together, Lionett._

“Hey,” Beau says, smoothly, as Yasha takes a seat in the chair across from her. “Running late?”

Yasha raises an eyebrow at her. “I--no? Am I?”

Beau mentally kicks herself, then rapidly changes course. “Yeah, no, no, it’s cool, totally cool. Super chill. So, how’s your classes?”

Yasha blinks. “Uh, they’re fine.” There’s a brief moment of awkward silence, before Yasha continues. “Can I--you already ordered?” She nods towards Beau’s now mostly empty cup.

“Oh! Yeah, I did,” Beau says, looking down at the cup and inspecting it as if she’d forgotten it was there, or as if she’d forgotten what a cup even was. “But honestly, I might go for seconds. I’ll come order with you, if you want something.”

“Isn’t having coffee this late in the day bad for you?” Yasha says. “Stunts your growth?”

Beau just shrugs. “I’m above average in height already, so I’m probably fine.” She pauses. “Or I could just get decaf. Wait, what are you getting, then?”

“Hot chocolate,” Yasha says simply. 

“Fair enough,” Beau replies, trying not to smile. “Want me to just buy it for you? That way we don’t both have to stand up.”

“No, no, it’s okay, I can get it,” Yasha says, a little quickly.

“Nah, dude, I got it. It’s my treat,” Beau says, already getting up from her chair, and feeling very gentlemanly. “One hot chocolate, coming up!”

As Beau’s walking off for the front counter, she catches Yasha’s eye, and sees her lips press into a thin line, like she wants to protest again. Beau pays for a decaf coffee for herself and a hot chocolate for Yasha without further arguing, though, so she counts it as a win. 

“So,” Beau says, a few minutes later, setting the drinks down on the little table between their chairs. “Got any fun Thanksgiving plans?”

“Not really,” Yasha says, tentatively sipping her hot chocolate and leafing absently through a notebook she’s pulled out of her backpack that Beau notes is mostly made up of doodles. “Haven’t really celebrated it in a while. You?”

“Eh,” Beau says, “I guess I have ‘plans,’ but it’s just dinner with my family, and then watching my dad and his brothers get all upset over football. At least I don’t have to go anywhere this year, though.”

Yasha hums, then glances up from her notes to meet Beau’s eyes. “Not a sports fan?”

Beau’s nose wrinkles a little. “Most sports are fine. I mean, football isn’t even that bad, it’s just annoying when people get so mad about it.” 

“Have you ever played?” Yasha asks. “Any sport. Not just football.”

“I mean, Fjord and I do throw a football around occasionally.” Beau sips her drink thoughtfully. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much before. I don’t know that my parents would let me.”

“Why not?” Yasha’s eyes are a little wide, with the question, and Beau sees that there’s no accusation in her words. She’s just...genuinely curious. It’s a weirdly refreshing reaction. Innocent, maybe.

“The kinds of things I’d be any good at are a little...boyish, I guess. Messy,” she shrugs, in response. “Like, I guess I’d just kind of... _love_ to try boxing, or wrestling, or something like that. But, I mean, I barely convinced them to let me _not_ be in band anymore. Don’t want me to ruin my image, I guess.” 

“You’d make a good boxer,” Yasha says.

“Thanks, I guess,” Beau sighs. “‘Till college.” 

Yasha looks back down at her notes and smiles a little, almost to herself. Every time Beau says something that makes Yasha smile it’s like a shot of adrenaline straight to heart, which is weird and probably bad for her and, also, a little bit addicting.

“You, uh--you ever play sports?” Beau says after swallowing more of her coffee and starting to pull out her own homework, just so she has something to do with her hands. “Or want to, I guess?”

Yasha seems to think about it for a moment. “I don’t know. I mean, I exercise. Maybe swimming?”

Beau raises an eyebrow. “Swimming?”

“Yeah? Is that weird?”

“Not weird,” Beau assures. “Just...not what I was expecting you to say.”

Yasha smirks. “I don’t know. Maybe boxing _would_ be fun.”

Beau can’t help the smile that creeps onto her face. “Now _that_ is more like what I expected.” Yasha rolls her eyes a little, at that, and somehow _that’s_ addicting, too. 

There’s a lull in the conversation, after that, but it’s an easy silence, and somehow Beau actually gets a lot more done than she thinks she ever would have if she had just gone straight home and tried to do her work up in her room. It helps that there isn’t a lot to do anyway, it being the week of Thanksgiving break and all, and it also helps that Yasha is both quiet and yet also receptive to Beau’s occasional rants about whatever dumb thing she has to be reading for AP Lit. (This week, it’s Oedipus. Which, really, is unfortunate, in pretty much every way possible.)

Somehow, Beau looks up from her reading, which is drenched in highlighter ink--it’s the only way she knows how to stay focused--to check her phone, and see’s that it’s already half past five. Their drinks are both long gone, and so is a scone that Beau ordered thirty minutes ago after fifteen minutes before that of complaining about being hungry. “Oh, shit, I probably have to go soon.”

Yasha pulls her eyes away from a worksheet full of algebra problems she’s been chipping away at for an hour and blinks. “Oh. Alright.”

“This was actually really productive,” Beau says, stretching her arms over her head. “We should do it again sometime. If you want.”

“That would be nice,” Yasha says softly. “I should probably get going now, as well, but--next week?”

“Yeah, dude, I’ll be there. Here. Next Tuesday,” Beau replies. 

“Great,” Yasha smiles. Beau rushes to pack up her stuff and say her goodbyes before her face gives away how flustered that smile makes her.

It’s only when she’s halfway to Jester’s house for cupcake taste-testing that she realizes that they _still_ did not establish a time to meet.

***

The second time they get coffee, the next week, it’s Beau who’s definitely, totally late. 

Yasha is already sitting in the same seat she was last week when Beau steps in, drenched and freezing from a heavy December storm outside. Yasha’s nose is buried in a book, and her hair is pulled into a ponytail that somehow manages to toe the line between genuinely effortless and purposefully effortless. 

She glances up, when Beau approaches the table. “You came,” she says simply.

“Yeah, of course,” Beau responds. “I, uh--I actually got you something.”

She pulls a wad of flowers, daisies, which she’d bought from a tiny garden store she’d passed on her way here, out of the pocket of her coat, then notices that they are crumpled to hell, and swears. “Aw, man, sorry--these were supposed to be, like, way nicer.”

Yasha’s eyes widen minutely as she takes the flowers. “Oh, no, these are lovely, Beau.” She combs over the petals with her fingertips gently, then snaps her multicolored eyes back up to meet Beau’s gaze. “I--thank you.”

Beau clears her throat and takes a seat. “It’s no big deal,” she lies.

Yasha tucks the flowers away, and they fall easily into a familiar rhythm of doing homework and looking up from their homework to chat or complain every once in a while. Yasha even once pauses to ask for Beau’s help on a history question, which is thrilling until Beau realizes she has no idea how to answer it, so they end up googling it together, which is thrilling in its own way. 

It’s weird, because what they’re doing doesn’t feel like _hanging out_ , perse. Beau isn’t used to the way that she and Yasha spend time together. With the rest of her friends, they’re always _doing_ something, _together_ \--playing a game or working on a collaborative project or cooking something, or even practicing music, which they did for the first time over Thanksgiving weekend, in Fjord’s moms’ garage. But with Yasha, sitting in this tiny corner cafe, working on homework for the classes they don’t share--it’s less like hanging out, in the traditional sense, and more like just existing. Existing, together. Near each other.

It’s peaceful, Beau thinks. 

There are moments when Beau glances up and sees Yasha dawdling on her phone, or with her brow furrowed, focused on a worksheet or a reading, and she wants to say something. She wants to ask about Obann, and make sure that Yasha still has a place to sleep at night. She wants to ask what this--this cafe, these being-near-each-others--means to her. But she always hesitates.

Sometimes, Beau thinks that Yasha is kind of like a stained glass window. She’s beautiful, but Beau’s worried that if she presses too hard, she’ll shatter. 

So she never asks.

“Hey,” Yasha says softly, breaking Beau’s train of thought. “Can I ask what’s going on with you and Jester?”

“What?” Beau startles, because the question is entirely unexpected.

“I don’t mean to assume,” Yasha quickly clarifies. “I just--the way you looked at her, at game night.” Beau waits for Yasha to elaborate on what _that_ means, but she doesn’t.

“I--well--nothing’s happening,” Beau says, hurriedly. “It’s--we’re just friends. Best friends. I mean, we grew up together. But that’s it.”

Yasha’s brow furrows, then smooths. “Ah. You haven’t told her.”

“Told her what?”

“That you’re in love with her,” Yasha says plainly. Beau makes a dying noise in her throat that sounds a little bit like she’s choking on her drink, which is impressive considering that she ran out of coffee twenty minutes ago.

“I’m--it’s not like that,” Beau finally manages.

Yasha smiles a little bit, lopsided. “It’s okay, Beau. I understand.” A pause. Yasha looks away. “She’s cute. And kind.”

“And funny,” Beau adds, despite herself. “And--you know. She’s complicated. She presents herself all bubbly and friendly, but she really does care, you know? And she’s smart--so smart, man, and she doesn’t advertise it, she’s not self-centered, but she’s still so confident, and silly, and--” 

Yasha is clearly trying _very_ hard not to grin at her as Beau cuts herself off and swallows. 

“I just meant,” Beau says, but she can’t finish the thought.

“It’s okay,” Yasha says. “Really.” Yasha’s eyes go a little sad, like the light in them leaks out a bit. “I know how it feels.”

Beau laughs nervously. “I mean--you won’t, like, tell anyone, will you?”

Yasha just shrugs. “I don’t have anyone to tell.” Beau breathes a sigh of relief, but Yasha continues. “But I think you should talk to her. I mean...you don’t want to miss your chance.”

“I know,” Beau says. “It’s just--I’m like, 99% sure she’s straight. And I don’t want to tell her, and she gets all weird about it, and then we aren’t best friends anymore, y’know? I mean--you remember how into Fjord she was, summer before freshman year, don’t you?”

“I do,” Yasha replies. “But she doesn’t seem into him now. And--the boy, with the pink hair--”

“Caduceus,” Beau says. “Yeah. He and Fjord have been dancing around each other for years. Jester was the one who first noticed, actually.”

“Hm,” Yasha says thoughtfully. 

“It’s just--if I knew for sure she was straight,” Beau says, “I feel like maybe I could get over it. Consider her a definite non-option and move on. But I can’t just ask if she’s straight, because--I don’t know. We don’t talk about that stuff. And even if we did, I don’t wanna be rude, or demanding. I know it’s not easy to figure out for everyone, you know?” She huffs and tucks a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s just that I don’t know for 100% sure that she’s straight, so my stupid brain is always gonna take that as, like, a glimmer of hope, that I might have a chance. And because there’s that glimmer of hope, I just can’t seem to kick this thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Yasha says. “That does sound difficult. But I still think you should talk to her.” Yasha tucks a strand of her own hair, fallen loose from her ponytail, behind her ear, an exact mirror to Beau’s action a minute ago, but gentler. “It’s like you said. She really cares. I somehow find it hard to believe that she’d stop being friends with you just because you like her.”

Beau sighs. She knows Yasha’s right--but it still feels more complicated than that. She loves Jester as a friend as much as she loves her in other, more romantic ways, and putting that at stake--even if the risk of actually losing her friendship is fairly low--just doesn’t seem worth it. But she doesn’t really know how to say that, so she just says, “Yeah. I guess.”

Yasha goes back to her work, and Beau tries to, too, but her focus is shot. She’s fidgety. The caffeine must be kicking in again. It’s making her antsy.

“I used to have a crush on you,” she blurts to Yasha, a full five minutes of silence later. Yasha’s eyes snap up to Beau, a little surprised. “I--uh, I mean. Back in, like, middle school.”

“Oh,” Yasha says, her face infuriatingly blank. “I didn’t know that.”

 _Oh, indeed,_ Beau thinks, mentally kicking herself. She laughs and hopes that it doesn’t sound too forced. “Yeah, I mean, I just. You’re pretty hot. Were pretty hot, I mean. I mean--not that you, like, aren’t hot, now, too. Um.”

Beau finally, _finally_ , manages to cut herself off before she starts rambling even further about Yasha’s hair and her athletic form and her heterochromia. Yasha opens her mouth, like she’s about to say something, but then her phone buzzes in her lap. She glances down at the notification, then suddenly starts throwing her books back into her backpack.

“I have to leave,” she explains. “Have to get home--there’s a party tonight.”

“Oh,” Beau says, a little hollow. “Have fun at your party, man.”

“Thank you,” Yasha says, slinging her bag over her shoulders. “I--same time? Next week?”

“Yeah, of course,” Beau responds, and then Yasha’s just gone, disappearing through the cafe door, around the corner, out of view.

After a minute of staring at the space Yasha was just occupying moments ago, Beau groans and leans her head back against the chair, eyes closed, and hopes to God that she hasn’t ruined something good.

***

By the third time, they’ve settled into some sort of routine.

Beau still, on occasion, buys Yasha flowers. After the first time, she takes to holding them in her hands, or tucking them against her chest inside her jacket, when it’s rainy, instead of taking her chances with shoving them into her pockets. Yasha always takes them, and thanks her, and puts them gently into her backpack, and then Beau never sees them again. She should probably stop buying her flowers. She doesn’t stop buying her flowers.

There are rules, involved in this routine. Beau thinks of them as the Things She Doesn’t Bring Up In Front Of Yasha. The conversations she wants to have, but that she can’t, because she doesn’t want to scare Yasha away.

Yasha’s family. Obann. Zuala and Molly. 

Beau’s rushed retrospective confession. She actually doesn’t even want to talk about that one, but Yasha doesn’t seem in a hurry to talk about it either, so it works out.

There are times when Beau comes a little close. For her AP Lit class, she has to choose a play to analyze and write a report on, and she chooses The Cherry Orchard, which is an early 20th century Russian play. Sometimes, she asks Yasha to help explain little parts of the language to her, and it feels almost too close to asking about her family. Didn’t she immigrate from Russia with her mom and her brother? Does her brother know she’s not living at home anymore?

But, mostly, she’s able to neatly dodge any uncomfortable topics. And it’s nice--it’s really nice.

She doesn’t tell Jester, or any of the rest of her friends, who she’s meeting with, or even that she’s still meeting with them at all. It feels like it would be hard to explain how it happened, and she also knows her friends well enough to know that if she told them, a few of them would want to come along. And the last time Yasha had hung out with all of them at once, it hadn’t ended well.

Yasha seems to want to keep things quiet. She still never texts Beau, and Beau still doesn’t initiate any text conversations. She remembers Jester mentioning that Obann goes into Yasha’s phone, sometimes, and she has to assume that that’s why. She doesn’t really know what Obann has against all of them, but if not texting her keeps Yasha from getting kicked out, Beau isn’t gonna complain. 

So. The hours they spend at the Blue Dot Cafe are a secret, and they stay that way, well into January, after winter break has come and gone, and the stormy late autumn and early winter has started to give way to sunny, twenty-degrees-Farenheit weather that finally gets Beau to wear a heavy coat on the regular.

The conversation about Jester turns out to be an exception to another rule to this whole arrangement: they don’t talk about their personal lives, beyond the superficial. They talk about homework. Beau tells Yasha about the continuing adventures of music practice. Yasha offers little information about what her life is like when she’s not here, with Beau.

Every week, Beau feels like something with this many rules shouldn’t feel as easy as it does.

But then there’s a week, towards the end of January, where Yasha almost doesn’t show up. She comes into the cafe with bags under her eyes a full hour after Beau sits down. She doesn’t make eye contact, as she approaches; barely makes a sound. 

“I’m so sorry,” she says quietly, voice a little shaky.

“Are you okay? What happened?” Beau snaps her book shut and sets it aside, leaning forward in her chair, trying to get Yasha to meet her eyes.

“It’s nothing,” Yasha says, “just didn’t sleep well.”

Beau feels a spike of fear and a little bit of adrenaline in her chest. “Yasha…”

“I said, it’s _nothing_ ,” Yasha emphasizes, a bit harsh. “You don’t have to worry about it. I’m sorry that I’m late.”

Beau opens her mouth to ask a question, but she can’t find the words. She remembers thinking of Yasha as a stained glass window, back in November, their second time getting coffee, and the picture comes together in her mind again--Yasha’s pale skin, her two-toned hair, her bulky thrift store sweaters, the bags under her eyes, all outlined in wrought iron, transparent enough in places for the light to streak through. 

Getting angry didn’t work. Maybe Beau should try a different strategy.

“Yasha,” she says, making her volume as low as she can manage, “You know that I’m here for you.”

Yasha still doesn’t meet her eyes, but her posture stiffens. “I do.”

“Listen,” Beau says, “I don’t--I have no idea, the kinds of things you’ve been going through. I’m not gonna pretend that I do. But--I don’t know. Sometimes, when my dad’s mad at me, he gets scary. Throws shit. Threatens me. He’s always--he apologizes, composes himself after, but it still sucks. But when I talk about it to Jester, it helps.”

Yasha bites her lip, which is pretty much all the confirmation that Beau needs that she was on the mark enough about this being an Obann thing. (She’s a little relieved, because it would have sucked to divulge all that dad stuff and have it turn out that Yasha’s thing was totally unrelated.)

“I’m not going to force you, or anything,” Beau barrels on, “but if you just need to tell someone. You can tell me.” She almost reaches across the little table between them to hold Yasha’s hand, but doesn’t want to spook her, and isn’t sure how Yasha feels about touch when she’s upset.

Yasha’s brow furrows. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what?”

“You,” Yasha says. “You just--you almost sound like him, but then you don’t.” 

There’s a minute or two of quiet, and Yasha runs a hand through her hair over and over, frustrated. 

“Do you--wanna get out of here?” Beau offers, suddenly, emboldened by the fact that Yasha hasn’t run or shut down yet.

“Where are we going?” Yasha says. 

“I know someplace a little quieter,” Beau says, gesturing to the bustle of the other people in the cafe and the whirr of machines behind the counter. “If you do want to talk, that is.”

Finally, Yasha’s eyes rise to meet Beau’s. “Sure.”

***

Beau doesn’t realize she’s heading to the little garden shop where she’s been buying Yasha flowers for the past few months until they’re practically standing in the doorway. Yasha’s followed behind her quietly for the few minutes walk it is to get here, and she nearly runs into Beau when she suddenly stops short just outside the door.

“The Housetree,” Yasha says quietly, reading off the sign above the door. It’s an old-fashioned wooden thing, carved with the name and a picture of a lopsided house with a tree growing out of its roof. Beau pushes inside. 

The interior is familiar to her now. There must be a lot of lights overhead, to help the plants grow, but the overall vibe is dark and crowded with pots upon pots of flowers, ferns, vines. There aren’t any employees in sight. They pass a shelf with a small crate of potted, tiny little whitish-purple flowers labeled _The Bright Queen’s Lace._

There’s a little greenhouse to one side of the store, sunnier and warmer, and Beau beelines for it, Yasha following behind her, mystified.

They stop, finally, in a corner of the greenhouse. Beau peels her backpack and coat off and sets them down on a stone bench tucked between a few small potted trees, a trellis of vines climbing up the wall behind it. Beau sits, but Yasha’s still looking around at all the green. 

“This place is beautiful,” Yasha says quietly, reverently. “I had no idea this was here.”

“I passed it, walking between school and the cafe,” Beau explains as Yasha finally takes a slow seat beside her. “And then I saw some, like, nice daisies or something in the window, so I came inside.”

“Daisies,” Yasha says, raising an eyebrow at her. 

Beau flushes pink a little. “Yeah, that’s--those were from here. You have a good memory.”

“They were really nice,” Yasha says. “I kept them. I used to press flowers a lot. So I’ve been keeping them--all of them.”

“Oh,” Beau says.

“I’m sorry, I know it’s weird.”

“No, no,” Beau says. “That’s--really sweet, actually. I’m glad you liked them.”

There’s a moment of silence. Somewhere in the depths of the greenhouse, a sprinkler clicks to life. Beau is busying herself examining a pot of some unidentifiable herb on the ground by her feet when Yasha speaks again.

“You wanted to talk?”

“Yeah,” Beau says. “Or--well. If you want to.”

Yasha sighs. “I don’t really know what you want me to say.”

“The truth,” Beau says, immediate and earnest. Yasha’s eyes meet hers, piercing. Beau knows it’s the wrong thing to focus on, but their hands are really close together on the bench. Beau could tilt her pinky out, just a little, and it would touch Yasha’s. Yasha’s nails are polished black, a little bit chipped.

“He was upset with me,” Yasha says. Her voice is gentle, but trembles. “Last night. I’m not sure why. There isn’t always a reason.”

_A deep breath. One, two, three._

“He doesn’t hit me,” Yasha establishes. “Sometimes I feel like he would, but that’s stupid. He’s never hurt me. He just...gets really upset. I make him really upset, I guess.”

_Another. Four, five, six._

“He needs space. So I give it to him. I leave when he asks,” Yasha says, “even when I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

_In and out. Seven, eight, nine._

Yasha goes quiet. Her words echo out into the greenhouse and get folded into the leaves on the trees and the vines.

“Yasha, I’m sorry,” Beau says, because it’s all she can say. I mean, what do you say?

That’s the trick of it, really. There’s no magic word to make it all go away easy. There’s nothing Beau can do or say that will make everything better. It’s frustrating. Beau does her best to fight the anger down, but a little of it bubbles up anyway. “That sounds like bullshit.”

Yasha flinches. Beau backpedals. “No, not--not your thing. His thing. Sounds like bullshit. I mean, why would he get mad at you like that all the time for no reason?”

“I don’t know,” Yasha says, “but he does anyway. So I try my best to stay out of his way when I have to.” She says it resolutely, like it’s simply a fact of the universe. “He’s usually pretty nice.”

“Bullshit,” Beau says again. “Yasha, it sounds like he’s manipulating you.”

“No,” Yasha says, quietly, brow furrowed. “I mean--if anything, I owe him. He doesn’t have to let me stay with him, in the first place.”

“You shouldn’t have to prove to him that you deserve a place to sleep at night,” Beau says, incredulously.

“We aren’t family, not by blood. We aren’t dating,” Yasha says, like that changes something.

“It doesn’t matter,” Beau replies. “It’s still real.”

Yasha looks up again, at that. Like it’s not what she was expecting Beau to say.

“Yash,” Beau says, “I’m so sorry.”

“What for?”

A realization. “I should have reached out to you more. After everything.” Beau stares down at her own feet. “You were clearly struggling. I mean, we all were, but you--it was...it was really bad. And when you started hanging out with Obann more than with us,” Beau continues, “I guess it just seemed like maybe it would be...better for you.” 

_I was afraid to be a reminder,_ Beau doesn’t say. _I was afraid of you, not because of you, but because I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to make it worse._

Beau thinks that, maybe, Yasha gets what she’s trying to say, anyway.

“It’s not your fault, Beau,” Yasha says, almost sounding a little affronted. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I didn’t do anything at all,” Beau says. “And that wasn’t better.”

“You know,” Yasha says, after a pause, “I miss them.” Beau knows, without asking, who she means.

“Me too,” Beau agrees, voice low.

There are a few almost painful minutes where neither of them says anything. The greenhouse is suddenly too quiet, a little stifling. Beau wants to stand up but doesn’t want to break whatever this is, the closest she’s come to understanding Yasha since they were little kids. 

“I miss you,” Yasha adds. She sounds surprised, almost, like she hadn’t vocalized the thought before. “All of you.”

“I miss you, too.” Beau means it.

“You remember that day,” Yasha says, finally. It isn’t a question.

It doesn’t need to be a question. Yasha knows, and Beau knows, too, that neither of them could ever forget that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again, so much, for reading. Writing this fic has been an adventure, so thanks for sticking with me for it. <3 Chapter eight’s title is from Like the Dawn by the Oh Hellos.


	9. don't think i'll make it if i lose you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Before I get into this chapter, I’d like to apologize for taking a three month hiatus out of nowhere. I’m not sure if you guys have looked out the window lately, but it isn’t great! Frankly, I haven’t been in the headspace to write this fic in a very long time.  
> I do want to say, even though I don’t have the spoons to respond to pretty much anything right now: I’ve seen every comment and kudos left on this fic and each and every one warms my heart. If you have left a comment on this fic, please know that I read it and I appreciate it more than you know, and it definitely kept reminding me that I needed to come back to this as soon as possible.  
> Additionally: We’re in the home stretch, folks. Thank you for your patience. I hope it’ll be worth it.
> 
> Content warnings: Mentions of death/injury, hospitals, drunk driving, throwing up, homophobia/getting kicked out. This is a rough one and I’m sorry, please take care of yourself. <3

_“You remember that day,” Yasha says, finally. It isn’t a question._

_It doesn’t need to be a question. Yasha knows, and Beau knows, too, that neither of them could ever forget that day._

***

Beau was grounded, that weekend. 

She doesn’t remember what she’d done to be grounded, but if she had to wager a guess, she’d say it probably had to do with cutting class, a habit she thankfully got out of after her sophomore year of high school. All the screaming matches she had with her dad during that time have blurred together with the age of the memories. 

But she was particularly upset about being grounded that weekend, of all the possible ones, because a new movie had just come out that they’d all been planning to see. God, at this point, she can’t even remember what movie it was. Zuala’s mom was letting her borrow their family’s minivan and they were all going to drive to the fancier, larger movie theater in the next town over, a bigger city with a nicer shopping mall. Zuala, being in the grade above them, already had her license. 

Caleb and Nott weren’t going either, at least. Beau had to try to feel better because of that. They were visiting some of Caleb’s family out of town for that whole week. They’d already been planning to catch a repeat showing the next weekend, when the two were back, and Beau would hopefully be ungrounded by then. 

But, you know. Still. Being grounded sucked fucking ass.

If she couldn’t go to the movies with her friends, the least her parents could do was let her sulk. Her bedroom door didn’t lock, but they were mostly semi-respectful of her space, and all she wanted to do was climb under the covers of her bed and watch old shows on Netflix and play Pokemon on her beat-up DS all weekend long. So the first time there was a knock at her door, she tried her best to ignore it.

“Beauregard? Honey, please open up.” 

It was her mom. It was only ever her mom, who knocked, because her dad only ever talked to her if he was going to shout, and if he was going to shout he needn’t bother knocking. 

Something in her voice made Beau pause before continuing to ignore her. She figured she’d go away, try again later, but she knocked again, more insistent now.

“Beauregard, this is serious. There’s been an accident.” 

Beau’s heart twisted. “An accident” was so vague. Was her dad okay? Her aunt and uncle? Grandparents?

She gave in, and crawled out of her blanket cave to open the door. She found her mother there, looking more tired than Beau had ever seen her.

“What happened? Is everything okay?”

“It’s Jester,” her mother said, and just like that, the floor dropped out from beneath her. Her heart plummeted all the way down to her father’s shitty wine cellar in the basement, and further, all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

There was water, rushing past her ears in heavy waves. “Marion called,” she heard, “car accident,” “hospital,” and “let’s go.” 

She barely registered her mother helping her put on her shoes, her coat, like she was five years old again. She dropped her heart back there, on the ground, she thought, and now she couldn’t find it to pick it up again. Her mom got her in the car, got them to the hospital. 

Beau didn’t know why her mother cared so much. Didn’t know why she would’ve even picked up a phone call from Marion Lavorre, for whom she had previously expressed polite disdain. Wasn’t really quite sure why Ms. Lavorre thought to call Beau’s mom at all. It doesn’t matter. None of it did or does or will.

Beau doesn’t remember getting from the car to the waiting room, but they did, and there was Marion, with her pretty deep red hair in a long braid down her back, pacing anxiously back and forth through the waiting room. When she saw Beau and her mom, she raced over and wrapped Beau in a tight hug.

“What happened?” Beau said lamely. She had left her heart somewhere--but where?

“The hospital called me half an hour ago,” said Marion, “while they were supposed to be on their way back from the movies. They were--the car--someone hit them, and--” 

Marion was shaking. Beau remembered things Jester had said about her mother--how she’d never driven her to school, how she’d hired babysitters and nannies to do even the grocery shopping. She didn’t leave her house. What was left of Beau’s heart sank even further at the realization that if Jester’s mother was here, it must be very, very serious.

From Marion, and a nearby nurse, she learned several things.

She learned that Zuala’s van had been hit by a drunk driver in the middle of a busy intersection, on their way back into town after the movie. 

She learned that Zuala was dead on impact. 

She learned that Mollymauk flatlined in the ambulance. That his heart refused to restart. 

She learned that Jester, Fjord, and Yasha fared better because they were on the other side of the car. They were in surgery now, she learned. Broken ribs and legs and arms. 

She’d seen them yesterday, she remembers thinking, as her mother’s arms snaked around her in an embrace. She’d seen them just _yesterday._

She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fjord’s sharp-toothed smirk and quirky accents. Jester’s flushed cheeks and violet eyes, one of the most unusual colors Beau had ever seen. Mollymauk’s vibrant laughter, his stupid, winking charm. Zuala’s soft smile--the gleam in Yasha’s eye whenever that smile appeared. The two of them, together, smelling like flowers. 

The mental images of her friends flashed behind her eyelids for hours. She cried until she’d nearly made herself sick. She couldn’t stop. 

Yasha’s mother, a woman Beau had only met a handful of times, bundled into the hospital soon after Beau and her mother showed up, and she and Marion had much the same conversation, this time with a different nurse there to update Ms. Nydoorin on her daughter’s condition. Zuala’s mother and father came through next, but they didn’t stay long. 

Molly’s uncle came and stayed, though. Mostly for Ms. Nydoorin’s sake, Beau later learned from her mother. Molly’s little cousin was there, a tiny thing of a girl with pigtail braids. Beau remembers feeling so sorry for her that she cried even harder every time she saw her out of the corner of her eye. 

Fjord’s foster parents were there. It was around when they arrived that Beau realized that she needed to tell Caleb and Nott, and her heart, sunk down beneath the sea, crumbled into tiny pieces at the prospect. She doesn’t remember what the message she wound up sending looked like, but remembers that Caleb convinced a friend of his from his hometown to drive him and Nott back early. They’d be there in a few hours, Caleb said. 

Beau doesn’t remember much of anything, after that. There were several hours spent in that hospital waiting room. She thinks she spent most of them crying, and then trying not to cry, and then crying more. 

Jester woke up first. When Marion was ushered back to see her, Beau wanted to go with her. “No,” her mother said softly, “you aren’t family. You can see her soon, dear.” 

But she _was_ family, Beau had wanted to say. She had known Jester Lavorre for 13 of her 15 years in this world, and the way she was suddenly forced to consider what it would be like to not know her anymore was like an iron weight around Beau’s neck. 13 years was not a long time, she decided. She had often felt like it was, like 13 years was an age, an eon, but sitting there in the hospital waiting room, it struck her just how little time it really was. In that moment, she felt younger than she’d ever felt before.

Fjord woke up soon after Jester, and his mothers followed the nurse back down the same sterile white hallway Ms. Lavorre had vanished into. She wanted to see him, too, wanted to see his crooked smile and the patch of white in his hair, and she wanted to hear him talk in the twangy accent that Beau had never questioned. She wanted to ask about it, too, she realized, while she still had the chance. She wanted to know everything about them, all of them, while they were still here.

She stopped crying, eventually, because it hurt too much to continue. Her mom bought her a water bottle from a vending machine, which she managed to down in record time. She sat in one of the half-comfortable chairs in the waiting area and tried her best to ignore Molly’s cousin and the questions she was asking and the answers she was getting. 

Caleb and Nott arrived before Yasha woke up. They bee-lined for Beau, who bee-lined for them, and they wrapped each other up in their arms, a desperate three-person group hug. _Last ones standing,_ Beau thought dryly. She was instantly mad at herself, for thinking it. But, she guesses, in that moment, it was kind of true.

In the weeks that followed her mother had forced her into grief counseling, and one of the things she remembers discussing is how memories become arrested--stuck, hidden--when you don’t want to think about them anymore. This is why Beau can’t remember when or if she went home that night, or how her father reacted to any of this, or precisely when she was actually allowed to go visit Jester. 

She remembers Jester’s hospital room, though. For one, because it was covered in flowers, from teachers and neighbors and acquaintances from school and all the lives that Jester’s had touched. A bundle of carnations from Caleb’s upperclassman friend, Essek; daisies and yellow roses from the girl in their math class who had transferred away last year, Calianna; even a small bunch of white peonies from Beau’s singular ex-fling, Keg. Cards and balloons from Jester’s art teacher. Beau didn’t bring any flowers. She hadn’t thought to. 

She sat next to Jester’s hospital bed, her mother and Marion talking in hushed tones to each other by the door, and tried to make small talk. Tried her best to make Jester laugh, and it didn’t work. Her arm was badly broken--her _drawing_ arm. With time, it would heal. But right then, in the uncertainty, time didn’t matter for shit.

She saw Fjord, too, briefly. He’d fared the worst of the survivors, crushed between massive metal chunks of car, but breathing. His legs both broken and his ribs cracked. Wheezing when he breathed. It was painful to look at. The way he flinched away from his foster moms like he was afraid that because he was broken they wouldn’t want him anymore was much worse.

Beau thinks she saw Yasha.

If her memories of Jester and Fjord in the hospital were hard to uncover after all this time, her memories of Yasha were buried at the bottom of the goddamn Marianas Trench under eighty feet of sand. Physically, Yasha wasn’t too bad--a dislocated shoulder, some fractured bones.

But the thing about Yasha in the hospital was that she was practically catatonic. She was totally unresponsive--to the doctors and nurses, to the psych team assigned to her, to her mother, to Beau. It seemed to make Ms. Nydoorin annoyed. It just made Beau feel hollow.

She went back to school, eventually. Her parents were more understanding than Beau expected them to be, but they still forced her back in time for Beau to catch the school assembly that served as a combination memorial service and anti-drunk driving PSA. She definitely remembers leaving twenty minutes in to throw up behind the gym building. 

Fjord and Jester recovered. Jester stayed in physical therapy for a few months; Fjord stayed in for nearly a year. They went to two funerals. They skipped the school-hosted vigils. Beau dodged whispers from classmates about her friends. She spent almost every day after school that year at Caleb’s house, throwing herself into schoolwork for truly the first time in her life. They met Caduceus Clay, and played games every Thursday next to the fireplace in the Blooming Grove. 

She saw Yasha at the funerals, and then she didn’t see Yasha anymore.

Just outside Beau’s vision, Yasha recovered, too. About a month after the accident, Yasha still wasn’t able to get herself to cry over it. Her brother was gone, off at school; Yasha wasn’t even sure her mom had ever told him she’d been in the hospital. Eventually, she told her mother who Zuala really was to her. Her mother made it clear that if those sorts of feelings were going to continue, she wouldn't be welcome in the Nydoorin household. 

She still regrets it, a little. Clearly, obviously, her mother wasn’t a great person, but Yasha thinks she could have managed the secret until she was old enough to be stable out on her own. But she’ll never know. 

When she first met up with Obann, a classmate and old internet friend, it was something of a relief. A reprieve. Here, said the universe, someone who cares about you, in your entirety. She convinced herself it was true, because the alternative was too much to bear. 

At fifteen, Beau learned a key fact about the world: it moves forward whether you’re ready for it to or not. At fifteen, Beau memorized the trip from her parents’ house to the cemetery.

At sixteen and a half, Yasha learned a key fact about the world: it tends to kick you in the stomach when you’re already curled up on the ground. At sixteen and a half, Yasha learned that taking the couch in someone else’s apartment is easier than sleeping in your car, even when you have to breathe through cigarette smoke. 

***

“I can’t believe she kicked you out,” Beau says, finally, “and after _that_.” 

Yasha breathes out. It’s not a laugh, but in context, it may as well be. “Some people are homophobes, I guess.”

“Your brother?”

“I have to assume he feels the same,” Yasha says quietly. “I certainly haven’t heard otherwise.”

“At least she had the decency to pay your hospital bills first,” Beau says, and that does startle a little laugh out of Yasha. 

“I’m not sure what would have happened, if she hadn’t.” 

Beau glances up to find Yasha’s looking at her, and, _Christ_ , she’s _smiling,_ just a little, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. Beau isn’t sure she can do this.

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

“Do what, Beau?”

“I’ve never been good at talking,” Beau says, “and, like, supporting. I want to. I’d like to be good at it. I’d like to learn.”

“I’ve never been good at talking, either,” Yasha says. Then, “Or being supported.”

Beau lets the beat of silence that follows find its place before she says, “D’you wanna try to figure it out with me?”

This time, when their eyes meet, Beau does her best to look serious and hold her gaze. She isn’t sure who moves first--but one moment, they’re a foot apart on the bench, and the next, Yasha’s hands are in her hair, messing up her ponytail beyond hope, and Beau’s hand is fisted in Yasha’s ratty sweater, and-- _woah._

Beau has maybe five seconds to process what Yasha Nydoorin’s lips feel against hers before Yasha pulls back and claps a hand over her own mouth, eyes wide. 

She says something in what Beau thinks might be Russian, but, truly, she thinks that anything Yasha said to her right now would sound like a foreign language. Her ears are ringing. 

She holds out a hand, grabbing for--something. “Yasha--”

“I am so sorry,” Yasha cuts her off. “I didn’t even think. I should--thank you. Sorry. Goodbye.”

Beau’s too dumbfounded to do anything other than watch Yasha stand and gather her backpack and leave, brushing past plants hanging from the ceiling in clay pots. There was a dormant firework in her chest, and now Yasha’s lit the fuse. 

Everything is sparks. In Beau’s mind, on constant loop:

_Holy shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I made this one chapter nine intentionally? Chapter title is from Better Now by Oh Wonder. <3


	10. and maybe i don't quite know what to say

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello friends! Just wanted to let you guys know I’ll be aiming for every other Monday updates ‘til I’m done! I’m not quite happy with this chapter, but I also want to stop looking at it, so here it is!
> 
> Cw for this chapter: brief discussion of homophobia
> 
> Enjoy! <3

Jester is elbows-deep in a bowl of strawberry buttercream frosting when she hears the doorbell ring.

“Mama, are you expecting someone?” she calls out into the house. Over the years, she’s gotten used to the way her voice sounds echoing through empty hallways. She takes the lack of an immediate response to mean that her mom is busy, and probably wasn’t expecting anyone after all.

“Well, I hope you can hold your horses for a moment, whoever you are,” she says to herself as she washes her hands free of sugar and butter. She wipes them dry on her apron as she moves from the kitchen to the front doorway, flinging it open.

Beau is standing on her doorstep, looking sheepish. Jester can’t tell if she’s just cold--she’s always telling Beau she needs to wear more layers; Beau is always insisting that she runs hot anyway--or if she’s blushing for some reason.

“Beau! Hi! I didn’t know you were coming over!” Jester steps out of the doorway immediately to allow Beau to shuffle inside. When she does, she notices that Beau’s ponytail is loose and tangled, like she got halfway through taking it out and then gave up. Jester is so, so curious. 

“Sorry,” Beau starts, “for turning up without a warning.”

“You know you’re always welcome,” Jester reassures. “I’m making cupcakes! Do you want to help me?”

Beau pauses, raising a skeptical eyebrow at her. Jester huffs. “Okay, do you wanna help me taste them, then?”

“I’d love that,” Beau says, “but I actually wanted to talk to you, too.”

“Can we talk and bake? I’m, like, super in the middle of mixing this frosting right now,” Jester says, spinning around in her messy apron in the direction of the kitchen.

“I--uh, sure?” Beau says simply, following Jester down the hallway, taking off her coat only to tie the arms of it around her waist like a middle schooler. Jester wonders why she doesn’t just set it down somewhere. Beau is fidgety. She looks nervous--like she’s ready to run.

Jester tries not to think about it as she comes back to the bowl of frosting and gets back to mixing. She tries not to think about it as Beau takes a seat across from her on a barstool pushed up to the huge island in Jester’s kitchen.

“So, listen,” Beau begins, then stops. “It’s, well.” Jester waits. “God, this is so fuckin’ stupid--”

“Do you have a girlfriend now?”

Beau nearly falls straight off of her stool, sputtering and turning red and basically confirming all of Jester’s suspicions right off of the bat. “What--no! That’s not it at all!”

Jester crushes down a bit of the nauseating feeling she’s felt every time Beau has hung out with her on Tuesdays and seemed spacey, like she was distracted, since the first Tuesday that Jester knows Beau met up with Mystery Girl. Beau stopped bringing up anything about Mystery Girl, but Jester is observative. She knows their meetings haven’t stopped. And now they must be dating.

Which, objectively, is fine. 

“It’s okay, Beau,” Jester says, “you don’t have to lie to me! Like, don’t get me wrong, I am DYING to meet her and get to know her and make sure she’s good enough for my best friend at all, but I’m, like, so happy for you!”

Beau looks pained. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Jes.” 

Jester stops her vigorous stirring, because Beau looks serious. “Really, Beau,” she says, forcing a laugh. “It’s fine! Look, I know you’ve been meeting with some girl every Tuesday since, like, Thanksgiving.”

“Wh--you  _ knew? _ ”

“Yes?”

Beau sputters more. “It’s--oh my god, Jester. No. It was Yasha. It was just Yasha.”

Jester nearly drops her whisk fully into the depths of fluffy sweet strawberry-ness. She isn’t sure why  _ that  _ piece of information, which should really make everything fit together  _ better,  _ makes her  _ feel  _ a whole lot  _ worse.  _

“You’re dating  _ Yasha _ ?”

“What? No!” Beau pauses. They stare at each other. “I--I don’t  _ think so! _ ”

“You were seeing Yasha this whole time and you didn’t tell me?” Jester tries to keep from sounding too hurt, but if Beau’s wince is any indication, she doesn’t do the best job. “I--you know how much I was worried about her. All this time.”

“I know,” Beau says. Jester knows her well enough to know that the look on her face means that she feels really, truly awful about this. “I’m sorry. We were trying to keep it on the down low.”

“On the  _ down low? _ ”

“Because of Obann! She didn’t want him finding out!” Beau quickly points a finger at Jester. “And we were not DATING.”

“Oh, you  _ were  _ not dating?”

“We weren’t! We were just hanging out and getting coffee and studying, and then today I tried to talk to her about, everything, and one moment it was sorta fine, and then suddenly she kissed me! And I don’t know what to do!”

Neither of them says anything for a full minute. “That’s a lot, Beau.”

“I know!” Beau cries. “And I know we don’t talk about this stuff, usually, and that I lied to you, and I hated doing that, for the record,” she adds, “but I need your help. I really don’t want her to ghost me.”

“Did you want her to kiss you?”

“No! Maybe?” Beau drops her head down to the counter, running her fingers through her already-destroyed ponytail. “I don’t know. I mean, she’s sweet, and super pretty, and she’s been through a lot but she’s still just so kind--”

Beau cuts herself off. Jester raises an eyebrow at her. “Oh, god. Jes, I think I might like Yasha.”

Naturally, it’s the very moment that Beau’s sharp blue eyes find Jester’s violet ones that Jester puts the final piece into a puzzle she’s been kicking around in her head for months. She thinks about the sinking feeling that she gets in the pit of her stomach whenever she considers the idea of Beau with another girl. She thinks about the thrill in her chest when Beau turns up at her house to help her bake or do her homework or just lay on her bedroom floor, singing along to the bubble pop radio stations that Jester likes and knows Beau hates. She thinks about holding Beau’s hand in the parking lot on the way into school. 

She thinks about the summer after freshman year. She thinks about the night she told Fjord how she felt. It was nighttime, in someone’s backyard--maybe his--and there were fireflies. “I want to kiss you,” she’d whispered, not into his ear but in the space just outside it. “I’m sorry,” he’d said back, and Jester knew he really was. She thinks about how it hurt, and then suddenly it didn’t hurt anymore--like it’d only ever been a superficial hurt. Like it had only ever been a superficial feeling. At the time, she’d thought of it as a blessing. She realizes it might be more complicated than that. 

She thinks about the night that Beau told her she liked girls. It was dark, up in her bedroom. All the lights off, just Beau’s silhouette in the shadows of the pillows on Jester’s bed. The way that Beau’s voice went quiet and Jester had to strain to hear the soft, “I don’t really like boys,” and Jester hadn’t understood at first, but then she had. Jester remembers every second of it vividly. She didn’t know she would, at the time. She thinks about how, on that night, in the dark with her best friend finding out that said friend’s potential dating pool included  _ her _ , her heart went a little faster. 

She thinks about Nott, in the art room: “How come you’re so hung up on it? I mean, if it was a date, wouldn’t you, you know, be happy for her?” 

She thinks about a red wagon, and Halloween parties, and sleepovers, and field trips, and lunchtimes in the courtyard. 

She thinks, dumbly:  _ ah, shit.  _

“Good for you,” Jester says, stilted. Beau is caught up in her own feelings, it would seem, and barely notices the obvious pitch change in Jester’s voice.

“It’s not good,” Beau laments. “Because she fuckin’ ran away after we kissed. And there’s also--”

Jester blinks, waiting for Beau to finish. Beau opens her mouth, then shuts it again. Then, finally, “There’s someone else.”

Jester’s having trouble breathing under the weight of her own realization, and  _ that  _ sentence--that Beau not only has this thing with Yasha, but that she’s pining after a second girl, too--that feels like a knife to the chest. 

Beau yelps as, suddenly, Jester’s bowl of frosting goes clattering to the floor, sweet fluffy pink globs smattering across the tile and the nearby cupboards. At some point, Jester had begun stirring again, and with the whir of her thoughts, she’d let the bowl slip.

“Jester? Jes, are you--”

“Maybe you should go,” Jester says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. She feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes, nonsensically, and tries to discreetly wipe at her face with her sleeve as she bends to start picking up the bowl and wiping up the mess.

Beau seems dumbfounded. “I--did I say something?”

“I have to finish these cupcakes,” Jester says instead of answering. “And make a new frosting.”

She still doesn’t meet Beau’s eyes as she hears Beau stand up from her seat. For a second, Jester thinks she’s gonna lean down to help scrub frosting off the floor with her. For a second, Jester thinks she’s gonna say something else. She kind of wants her to.

Instead, she just listens as Beau exits the kitchen and lets herself out the front door.

***

When Jester doesn’t know where else to go, she goes to the Blooming Grove.

Well, normally, she’d go find Beau. But for this particular problem, she can’t exactly go to Beau, and Caduceus is always in the cafe, and she wants to hear his voice and have him make tea and pastries for her so that she doesn’t have to think about how she loves her best friend and might have fucked it up irrevocably.

By the time she finishes mopping up spilled frosting off of her kitchen floor, it’s nearly closing time for the cafe, so when she gets there, there are only a handful of other customers lingering around, and Caduceus is sweeping in front of the cafe’s counter. When he sees her, he smiles, then frowns--she’s sure he can already tell something’s off.

“Hey,” he greets, setting the broom aside. “Something wrong? You seem a little stressed.”

She tugs her emerald green coat closer around her shoulders. “I don’t wanna interrupt or anything. I just wanna hang out!”

He seems skeptical. She’s not sure if she’s really bad at pretending everything’s fine, or if he’s just that insightful. Probably both. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like he’s about to push her to talk to him if she doesn’t want to. 

Instead, he seats her in a soft chair near the fireplace, takes her coat, and brings her a cup of tea and two eclairs, which she quickly consumes. She stays there, staring at the fire and trying not to sulk, as the cafe empties out and Caduceus closes down, then comes to sit in the chair next to hers.

“So,” he says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Ugh,” she says instead of answering.

“Oh, I hear that.”

A pause. “I just don’t know how to deal with feelings right now.”

“Well,” Caduceus says, “even when it’s hard, it usually feels better to try your best to find a way to deal with tricky feelings, instead of just letting them fester.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says miserably. “But I think I did a bad thing.”   


He doesn’t say anything, just passes her a third eclair, still chilled from the fridge. She takes a bite and groans in frustration.

“So you know that girl Beau said she was meeting up with back in like, November?”

“You mean Yasha?”

“ _ What _ ? Caduceus, you  _ knew  _ it was Yasha?” Jester swallows another bite of pastry. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Was it a secret? I figured you knew.” Caduceus drinks from his own cup of tea. “Besides, I gave Yasha’s jacket to Beau to give to her after she left it here at game night.”

“Yeah, well, she’s still been meeting up with her, like, every single week,” Jester says. Caduceus doesn’t react to this in any way that indicates to Jester whether or not he knew that, too, so she barrels on. “And apparently, today they  _ kissed. _ ”

Caduceus still doesn’t react.

“Isn’t that crazy?” 

He just takes another sip of tea. “Is it crazy?”

“Wh--I mean--yeah!” Jester throws her arms into the air helplessly. “Yeah, it’s crazy! I didn’t even know they were close!”

“But they are,” Caduceus says.

“Well, yeah, I guess so,” Jester says, deflating. Then, after a pause, “But, like...hypothetically. What if someone else wanted to kiss her? I mean--Beau. Or Yasha!  _ Hypothetically _ .”

Caduceus hums thoughtfully. “Well, I don’t know. Hypothetically, I guess it would probably be best for whoever also wanted to kiss them to talk to them about it. That way, they can figure it out together.”

“Well, yeah, but-- _ hypothetically, _ ” Jester counters, “what if they person who wants to kiss them doesn’t want to mess up this good thing that they have with each other?”

“That’s a good point,” Caduceus concedes. “But it doesn’t sound like it would be very fun for the hypothetical person, would it?”

Jester sighs. “No, I guess it wouldn’t be very fun at all.”

Caduceus sets down his teacup and gives her a knowing look. “It’s okay, you know. Wanting to kiss her, I mean.”

Jester turns bright red, shoulders scrunching up to her ears. Of course Caduceus knows. Caduceus knows  _ everything.  _

Well, everything except--

“It’s okay for  _ you  _ to want to kiss  _ him _ , too,” she shoots back. She feels a little satisfaction when his cheeks tint red, too, and his eyes widen a little. “You’re not the only one with crazy magic insight powers!”

_ That,  _ for some reason, makes Caduceus laugh a little. “Well, you know. It is a little bit complicated.”

“What, like my thing isn’t?” she says. 

He laughs again, and rubs at the back of his neck, a little embarrassed. “I suppose that’s only fair.” 

She smiles at him, feeling better to know that, if nothing else, there’s someone in the same boat as her. But the feeling of being understood this deeply reminds her of the way she feels when she talks to Beau, and then she starts to feel shitty again.

“Deuces, I think I reeeeeeeally fucked up,” she says, looking away. “When Beau told me about her and Yasha--I mean, I just got so upset! Because before she said that I didn’t know why I was so upset thinking about her with some random girl, and then I found out it was Yasha, who, you know, is super hot and sweet and they’re so good together…and I got jealous and told her to leave.”

“It sounds like you need to talk to her,” Caduceus says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. And it’s obviously easier said than done but, truly, hearing him state it so plainly does help.

“I know,” she admits. “But I’m not sure what to say.”

“Why not tell the truth?” 

“Like, how I feel?”

“Sure,” Caduceus says, shrugging. “I don’t see why not.”

“Because what if she doesn’t feel the same way?” 

“What if she does?”

And Jester really hadn’t even considered  _ that,  _ but suddenly it’s all she can picture--showing up at Beau’s house, throwing rocks at her window like those cheesy '80s romance movies, convincing her to sneak out so they could hold hands and laugh at nothing together and  _ maybe even _ \--

_ Beau did say there was someone else, too— _

“Oh my god,” she groans into her hands, sinking down into her chair. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You don’t have to,” Caduceus tells her, “but I think that you should. I think you’ll feel better if you do.”

“What about Yasha?”

“What about her?”

“Beau likes her. She told me so.”

“Beau could like two people at once,” Caduceus says simply. Jester nods, because that’s exactly what Beau had seemed to be about to explain before Jester freaked out on her. “Yasha could too, for all we know. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to figure this out, but I think you’ll be better off if you face it, instead of hiding from it.”

“That does make sense, I guess,” she says. “Hey, wait, I’ll tell you what! I’ll tell Beau how I feel if you tell Fjord how you feel.”

“I--well, you see,” Caduceus stammers. 

“I do see!” Jester says, pointing a finger at him. “You  _ like him!  _ You should take your own advice, and let him know, even if it’s not easy, because you’ll feel better after!”

Caduceus blinks, like he’s not used to having his own words thrown back at him. “I--well--maybe I will,” he says. 

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure he’s, like, super duper into you, and I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for _ ever _ .”

“Okay, I do doubt that,” Caduceus says, “but I’ll try to give him a call. And you should go talk to Beau, too.”

“I will,” Jester says, realizing as she does that she means it. “I’ll talk to Beau.”

***

When Beau is back in her bedroom, pointedly not doing her homework--not doing anything besides sulking, really--it starts pouring rain outside.

It’s still really deep in the winter for it to be raining this much for this long. Beau sits in front of her bedroom window and stares out at the storm, trying not to think about Yasha and Jester and everything. 

She’s not doing a very good job of this.

Jester had seemed so upset. She’d asked her to  _ leave _ , which has literally never happened before in the past decade and a half of them knowing each other. Is it possible that, all this time, her best friend has been secretly homophobic? That she was only ever okay with Beau liking girls in theory, but not in practice, and now she wants nothing to do with her?

But Jester had said that it was fine, that she was happy for her, before she clarified that it was Yasha. So maybe not. Beau doesn’t know. She’s driving herself insane thinking about it.

She’s so not in the mood for it when she hears her father’s voice calling her name from the downstairs hallway. She groans, and yells back, “What is it?”

“Your friend is here,” he calls back. “Come get the door.”

Beau’s brow furrows. Who the fuck is  _ here _ ? At her house? They never hang out at her house. Beau doesn’t like hanging out with her friends at her house.

She pulls on a pair of slippers and thuds down the stairs, past her dad tapping his foot impatiently at her in the hallway, out to the front door, which she opens.

And there’s Jester, sopping wet from the rain.

“I want to talk to you,” she says.  _ Oh god. Here it comes.  _ “Come outside?”

“Jes, it’s pouring, and fully nighttime,” Beau says. “Do you want to come in? You’re drenched.”

“Please, just for a second,” Jester pleads. Beau thinks about protesting again--she’s in her pajamas and slippers, after all--but gives in at the look on Jester’s face. She’d give this girl anything.

She steps outside, wrapping her thin hoodie closer around herself, yanking the hood up over her already messy hair, and quietly shuts the door behind her. “What do you need, Jes?”

Jester opens her mouth like she’s about to start talking, then closes it again. Then, she groans. “Ugh, why does this have to be so  _ hard _ ?”

“Look, whatever it is, you can just tell me,” Beau says, pretending that she won’t feel like she’s been stabbed in the chest if Jester says what Beau thinks she’s about to say--that they can’t be friends anymore. That Jester doesn’t want to be friends anymore.   
  
So Beau is almost bowled over with surprise when Jester instead blurts, “I like you.”

“I like you too, Jes,” Beau says, plainly.

“No, no no no, Beau,” Jester says, with emphasis: “I  _ like  _ you.”

Beau cannot breathe. “You--what?” 

“Like,  _ like like  _ you,” Jester says, all in a rush. “And I’m so so sorry I snapped at you and told you to leave, I feel so bad about it, but I just got so jealous when you were talking about liking Yasha, and I couldn’t figure out why, but now I know why! It’s because I  _ like  _ you!”

Beau’s pajamas are, at this point, soaked through. She feels rooted to the spot, to the stone ground of her front porch; she couldn’t move if she wanted to. 

“And I know you like Yasha,” Jester continues, “and so, like, it’s okay and stuff. I’m happy for you, really. I don’t want to mess anything up. But I just wanted you to know. That I like you. Because I do. Like you.” 

Suddenly, Beau isn’t rooted to the spot anymore. Because this time, Beau knows that she moves first. And Jester doesn’t pull away.

Jester isn’t very good at this. Beau realizes that she probably hasn’t had a lot of practice. Beau wouldn’t say she’s had a lot of practice, but she finds herself leading Jester through the kiss, as Jester clutches at her arms, her soaked hoodie, and Beau cups her cheek gently, threads her fingers into the curls at the nape of Jester’s neck. 

Briefly, Beau thinks about Yasha. But it’s weird, because thinking about Yasha doesn’t fill her with confusion--she just wishes Yasha were here. That she could kiss them both. All those late hours she spent wondering why she couldn’t find room in her heart for the two of them at once seem a little silly, now. Jester makes a little noise into her mouth, though, and then Beau’s thoughts short-circuit, and that’s all she can think about, on repeat for infinity. 

It’s over in moments. They pull away, but stay close, wrapped up in each other. God, Beau hopes her dad isn’t watching from inside. 

“How long?” Jester asks her. Beau can feel her breath on her face. The storm keeps going around them; the rain would drown out Jester’s quiet words if they weren’t mere centimeters away from each other. 

“Forever,” Beau says, because it feels like the truth.

“We could have been doing this  _ forever, _ ” Jester laments, and Beau’s laughter is cut off when Jester kisses her again.

And she knows that they should probably talk about this--that they should figure out what exactly their feelings are, and they should go somewhere where it’s dry and Beau’s dad can’t see, and they should talk about Yasha, too. Talk  _ to  _ Yasha.

But they can do all of that later. For now, rain-soaked on the front porch, Jester’s lips against hers, Beau thinks that there’s nowhere else in the world she’d rather be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! <3 Chapter 10’s title is from this is me trying by Taylor Swift.


	11. come home to my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! A non-Monday update to make up for me missing last Monday (whoops). Hope you guys enjoy!
> 
> Also: THANK YOU so much for 3k+ hits and 250+ kudos--that is, truly, bonkers. I love y'all. <3
> 
> Cw for this chapter include alcohol usage, mention of smoking, Obann being manipulative, some self-inflicted violence + blood mention, & mentions of parental mistreatment.

Yasha has no idea why she did that. 

Well, that’s not quite fair--she is achingly familiar with the reasons why she _wanted_ to kiss Beau. What is, frankly, far _more_ upsetting is just how easily she forgot all the reasons to _not_ kiss Beau. 

There are quite a few reasons. Obann will kill her if he finds out, for one. She hadn’t realized she was over Zuala yet, for two. And she knows Beau has it bad for Jester, for three.

She feels like an idiot. She’s angry at herself for letting herself get pulled in by Beau’s electric blue eyes and kind words--not just today, but for the past _three months_. She’d thought she was handling it well, because she’d been managing to keep it from Obann without feeling too guilty, and she’d been managing to be friends with Beau in something approximating a normal way, and it was all normal and good and fine, and so naturally, because Yasha is who she is, it couldn’t’ve lasted.

So she should have expected it, but it still sucks.

She realizes as she’s already home, her hand already reaching halfway to the handle of the front door to Obann’s apartment, that she looks like a mess. She takes a deep breath, trying to steady what feels like an entire ocean of doubt in the pit of her stomach. Smooths her hair--as much as it’ll get smooth, anyway--and adjusts the sleeves of her sweater, trying not to think of Beau’s fingers curled into the fabric less than half an hour ago. 

She opens the door.

She’s hit with the sound of laughter and the smell of alcohol the minute she steps inside, dropping her old, worn backpack inside the doorway beside the coatrack and toeing off her sneakers. The laughter is both Obann and someone Yasha doesn’t recognize. She’s willing to bet the alcohol is Obann’s, too.

Sure enough, she turns the corner past the little entry hallway and there he is, draped across the shitty couch, a half-empty bottle in one hand, some girl sitting up against the couch’s arm, cradling her own bottle, legs crossed gently and her feet resting on Obann’s lap. They haven’t noticed her yet, still too caught up laughing at each other, at some joke that Yasha was too late to hear. From this angle, she can barely see the tattoo on the back of Obann’s neck, just beneath the edges of his hair, disappearing slightly beneath an old t-shirt. 

She shifts her weight from one foot to another, and looks down at the carpet where she stands. Obann has bitched to her plenty about how annoying it is that the apartment is carpeted, because hardwood floors would be way easier to clean and take care of, and if he wanted the floor to be soft he could just get a rug. Sure enough, there are several stains scattered across the living room and, Yasha knows, extending into Obann’s bedroom. It’s an ugly carpet, really. Nothing poetic about it at all. Yasha doesn’t know why she can’t stop staring it.

She hears her name, and looks up to see Obann looking at her with an easy smile, likely made even looser by whatever he’s drinking. The girl, who Yasha thinks now she may have met at a party once or twice, is regarding her curiously, but not unkindly. 

“Yaaaash,” Obann repeats, slurring in a way that is clearly tipsy but not quite drunk. “Come meet Liz. Liz, this is Yasha, ‘was tellin’ you about her before.”

Liz lifts her bottle towards Yasha in greeting. Something in Yasha’s chest blooms with warmth knowing that someone was thinking about her when she wasn’t even there. She takes a seat on the armchair, accepts one drink but not a second, and thinks.

She watches the easy, simple way that Obann chats with Liz, an echo of a scene Yasha’s seen a hundred times before, at parties in this apartment and at the neighbors’ and across town. She’s always been a little jealous of his people skills, the way he could make friends with a windowpane if he tried hard enough. Even though Yasha is contributing relatively quite little to this conversation, Obann keeps throwing her happy looks that set her at ease.

She thinks back to what Beau said to her--before the whole conversation got thrown off the rails by, well, everything--about Obann. _It sounds like he’s manipulating you. You shouldn’t have to prove to him that you deserve a place to sleep at night._

For the first time maybe ever, Yasha lets herself think about this Obann--friendly, eased into a happier state by booze, caring and attentive--at the same time as the Obann who is fiercely protective, whose tattoo matches her own, at the same time as the Obann who shouts and insults her and tells her to leave, at the same time as the Obann who cries and apologizes and lets her back through the door. Objectively, it doesn’t make any sense. These shouldn’t all be the same person, right? 

It hits Yasha simply and suddenly. That Obann could be nice to her, and it still wouldn’t justify all the hurt he’s caused, that he sometimes doesn’t even apologize for. That she can hold memories of his smile and his fierceness and his friendliness, _and_ memories of the way his face looks when he’s angry and the words he uses to degrade her. All of it, all at once. 

It isn’t easy to think about. And she can’t do anything about it right this minute. So instead of doing anything about it, she just keeps drinking.

***

Yasha doesn’t ghost Beau, but she comes pretty close.

They still meet up every week or so at the Blue Dot, but never for nearly as long as they used to. Every time Beau tries to bring up the kiss, Yasha either manages to change the subject at the last minute, or flat-out leaves, making some excuse about having somewhere else to be. She thinks Beau knows that it’s bullshit, but Beau eventually takes the hint. 

Yasha feels absolutely horrible about it, because she really had liked what they’d had going, even just as friends. She would’ve been happy--beyond thrilled, really--to keep being friends. But it’s her fault. She’s the one who messed this up, and now she’s realizing just how fragile that friendship really was. 

She survives school, for the most part. It’s never been something Yasha’s enjoyed, so it’s nothing new to skate by on minimal effort, just enough to get her through, nothing more. 

What is a little new is that Obann, for the past several weeks, has been in an absolutely phenomenal mood.

She isn’t sure what’s got him feeling so chipper any more than she’s ever sure why Obann feels and acts the way he does, but he’s been nothing but kind and understanding to her--buying the drinks she likes on his grocery runs, helping her tidy up the living room after a particularly raucous party, even picking up flowers for her on his way home from work one day. She puts them in an old glass bottle as a makeshift vase on the rickety kitchen table, and when they start to wilt, she presses them into her notebook alongside all the flowers Beau brought her.

Another thing that’s new is that when she catches glimpses of Beau in the halls at school--whenever Yasha bothers to show up--more and more, she sees her with Jester. The two of them hold hands and keep their heads bowed close together, and Beau’s not mentioned it to Yasha at all, but Yasha knows anyway. She knows that it’s better this way, that she and Beau would never have worked, but seeing it still makes her heart ache for something she refuses to name.

She starts to convince herself that this whole time, she’s been wrong. Because things are fine with Obann and not so fine with Beau, and so it’s easy to feel like the complicated way she feels when she thinks about Obann being bad for her, and everything Beau told her emphatically that day in the greenhouse, is something she can tuck away into a cupboard somewhere and deal with later. For now, she lets time pass.

But the problem with later is, of course, that it always happens eventually. 

Yasha is on the couch and Obann is sitting sideways in the armchair, one day in late March, a day or two into spring break. The television is on, but the volume is down, so it’s just the visual elements of a long series of infomercials, with no audio; neither of them are paying attention anyway. The window is open. For once, Obann isn’t smoking anything. 

“You remember Liz, right, Yasha?” Obann says suddenly, craning his neck around to look at her, flicking a pair of cheap knockoff sunglasses from the bridge of his nose up to rest in his messy hair.

Yasha does remember Liz. She nods.

“Did you know that she and I have, like, a thing?”

“A thing,” Yasha repeats.

“Yeah.” He laughs. “She was, actually, like, about to be jealous of you and me ‘fore I explained that you don’t swing that way.”

This has happened before, Yasha knows. Obann always seems to find it funnier than she does. She doesn’t say anything.

“Anyway,” Obann continues, still blatantly cheerful, “I think it’s part of why I can never get her to come over here anymore. So, like, I hate to ask this, but do you think you could head out for tonight?”

“I’m sorry?” Yasha replies. _Is he really asking--_

“Yeah, just, like, go crash wherever else you go normally.” He waves a dismissive hand in her direction.

Yasha blinks, hard. She realizes briefly, embarrassingly, that there’s something like tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. “I--where do I—?”

He cuts her off with a groan. “Ugh, are you going to make this, like, a thing?”

_A thing._

“I don’t have anywhere,” Yasha says, dumbfounded. “I thought you knew that.”

He doesn’t meet her eyes. Suddenly, the tears she’d been afraid of are gone; instead, it feels like someone’s set Yasha’s stomach to boil.

“How can you ask me that?” 

“I didn’t think it’d be a big deal!” Obann says, still looking away. “It’s never been a big deal before.”

“It’s different,” Yasha says carefully, “when it’s because you need space. But this--”

“I still need space! It’s just a different kind of space,” Obann says, cutting her off. Yasha’s anger flares again.

“Do you understand what you’re asking?” Yasha sits up straighter. She can’t quite believe that, after all this time--after weeks of him being happy and nice and kind--he’d say something like this. That he’d think it was okay. 

It feels like a snake uncoiling steadily in the room around them; it feels like Yasha’s been playing a constant high stakes game of chutes and ladders, and every time she feels she’s almost at the end and out the other side, she’s put right back at square one. 

She thinks of Beau. She thinks of Beau and Jester. She thinks of Beau and Jester and Fjord and Nott and Caleb and Caduceus. She thinks of Molly and Zuala. 

_Is this why he never wanted me to see them?_ Yasha realizes, almost deliriously. _Because it’d make it easier for me to stand up to him? Because I’d have someone besides him to turn to?_

Beau’s voice echoes: _It sounds like he’s manipulating you._

“This is ridiculous,” Obann enthuses. “I thought you’d get it.”

“You _don’t_ get it, Obann,” Yasha says. “You don’t know what it’s like to leave the only place you have to sleep.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have some tragic backstory, Jesus,” Obann says.

 _I can’t do this anymore._ “Stop fucking _dismissing me_!”

Obann finally, slowly, turns in his chair to look at her, incredulous. Yasha’s standing--when did she stand up?--and she can’t quite believe she just yelled at him. He deserves it, she thinks, but it’s never happened before. She’s never been able to find the strength.

“Orphanmaker, come on--”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, her voice breaking. “You can ask me to leave. That’s fine. But if you keep asking, I’m not going to come back.”

His eyes narrow, like he thinks she’s lying. 

Then he speaks again, and it’s decisive. Yasha feels the weight of the words like a sword in her gut. “Fine. Leave.”

She feels a split-second of terrible, terrible sadness, staring him down, towering over him. She understands, in a moment of clarity, that this could be the last time. The tattoo on her neck burns.

Silently, she gathers up her phone, her backpack, her jacket. Stuffs some sweaters from the hall closet into her bag. Her feeble belongings, never quite unpacked; never quite at home. 

Obann’s bedroom door shuts. He doesn’t watch her go.

She slips on her shoes, and makes the decision she hasn’t let herself make for the past three years. 

The door to the apartment slams closed behind her.

***

Yasha breaks down.

She’s in that old abandoned building again, because nothing has changed, and she still has nowhere to go. She’d kind of thought that after she realized that he was hurting her, that he didn’t really care about her, that maybe she didn’t _want_ to be there after all, that things would suddenly, magically be easy. She thought that she had figured it out, but really, all that’s changed is that she’s out of a place to sleep by choice this time.

By _choice._ Doesn’t that matter? When Zuala and Molly died, she didn’t get a choice. When her mother told her to leave and not come back, she didn’t get a choice. Everything Obann’s told her or done to her over the past few years has been to eliminate her choice. She doesn’t get to choose her friends or her job or her life or anything.

Even now, making the choice to be here instead of in his apartment, it feels like a fake choice. Sleep on the street or sleep on the couch of a man who will manipulate you into staying, only to ask you to go just when things were good; who will say anything to keep you in a place where he can mistreat and isolate you.

Yasha is sick of feeling like her life is a series of things that happen _to_ her. She wants, more than anything, to do something on _purpose._

So she punches a wall. On purpose. 

She punches the wall and she screams at the top of her lungs, for the whole town to hear. And it hurts. Yasha’s hands start to bleed. The red of her own blood mixes with the dirt at her feet, and she thinks her nose might be bleeding, too, and it’s _gross_ , and Yasha feels better than she has in months because, if nothing else, all of it is _hers_.

Time blurs. All of it is just pain, and the feeling it, and the deliberateness of the action, until Yasha tires herself and collapses in the dirt, head on her knees.

When she hears the crunch of footsteps on the gravel outside, she barely registers it. Until--

“Oh my god, Yasha. Yasha-- _Jesus, Yasha._ ”

There are strong hands on her shoulders, tracing down her arms to find her hands and holding them, bloodied though they may be. There’s a hand on her chin, her cheek, tilting her face up, and--

There’s her brother. There’s Kord. 

He’s talking to her in Russian now, asking if she’s okay, asking what happened, why she’s here. And if seeing her brother’s face for the first time in years wouldn’t break her, then, God, hearing him speak in soft Russian to her absolutely does. 

She reaches up, and he reaches down, and they pull each other into a hug. The Nydoorin kids, falling into silence, sharing a moment for the first time in years.

And then, breaking the silence like glass, Yasha lets herself begin to cry.

***

Kord is staying in a hotel room in town, not at their mom’s house. He’s on spring break from college. He takes her to the hotel. She takes a shower in the hotel bathroom and she uses up all the hot water that it’ll give her, until the stream at her feet runs clear instead of red.

The way he’s looking at her as she sits down beside him on the bed, wearing his giant sweatpants and one of her own Goodwill sweatshirts, towelling off her hair, makes Yasha want to be sick, a little. He’s all guilt and pity, and the lines of it are unfamiliar on his face. She elbows him a little, trying to get him to stop. He looks away.

“I didn’t realize,” he begins. 

“She didn’t tell you?” 

“Not at first,” Kord says, running a hand through his own hair. “I mean, I’ve known for a while that you weren’t at home. I’m not an idiot.”

Yasha says nothing.

“I just didn’t realize how bad it was. How bad _she_ was. What she actually did to you.”

“What changed?” Yasha asks.

Kord laughs, a bit sour. “Me, I think. I stopped putting up with her. She didn’t like that.” 

Yasha thinks about the way Obann’s face changed when she yelled at him. “I understand that.”

“I told her what she did to you was unforgivable,” Kord says. “And she prattled on about how she has no children, or whatever, so I took off. Stayed in town, hoping to find you.”

She says nothing again, so he takes a deep breath and carries on.

“Look, _solnyshko_ ,” he says, “I’m sorry. You deserved better.”

The air pressure in the room feels like it drops by a few degrees; Yasha hadn’t realized how tense she’d been.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says, soft.

“You needed help, and I wasn’t there. I should’ve been.” He puts a steady hand on her shoulder. “But I can be here now. We’re going to figure this out, okay?”

Yasha’s heart isn’t soaring, but it’s as close as it’s come to that since Zuala. “Okay.”

***

It’s tricky, making it work.

They have no support from their mother--of course. A few weeks later, Kord will email Yasha a Redfin link for a listing for their childhood home, up for sale, and Yasha will let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding for years.

Kord can’t stay in town forever, because he still has school--he’s in his senior year, only months from his degree. He has a paid internship. He also has an apartment. He offers to take her home with him.

She almost takes him up on it.

Instead, they settle on this: Kord helps her find a job, at the library where she spent so many of her days when she couldn’t go anywhere else. They always want to hire a few high school students to help reshelve and answer people’s questions, the librarian explains to them. Kord has a good rapport with a librarian back at school, and with him vouching for her--plus her history of being a courteous user of the library’s services, who always cleans up after herself--Yasha gets the job. 

She stays in the hotel with her brother until they can find a teeny studio apartment in town that her new library job can support. When she comes up short on the deposit, Kord spots her without her even asking. She almost doesn’t want to take it, but doesn’t think he’d back down if she tried to fight him on it. So she doesn’t.

The apartment is, truly, miniscule. Yasha is practically too tall to stand up straight in some places. The furniture is sparse. One of Kord’s roommates drives down to bring some old stuff they don’t need at their place anymore--bedspreads and blankets, a lamp, pots and pans, even old clothes and shoes. The first night she sleeps there, in her own bed, she sleeps so soundly she can hardly believe it.

She couldn’t have gotten it without her brother’s support, but he asks for nothing in return, making it clear: it is hers, hers, hers. 

Four days in, she gets a message from Obann. She sees the notification but not the message, and hands her phone to her brother. Kord blocks Obann’s number.

After a heartbreaking goodbye-for-now, full of Kord and Yasha exchanging promises to text and call and email and everything, Yasha, for the first time since she was sixteen, goes home. 

She collapses into the rickety bed. Through the small, dirty window on the wall above her come soft rays of early spring sunshine; the dust she kicks up catches in the light, slowly dancing through the air around her. She closes her eyes and lets herself feel okay.

Then, after a few minutes, she picks up her phone.

_Hey, Beau._

_If you’re in town this week, could we meet up to talk?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Chapter 11’s title is from Supercut by Lorde! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, thanks for reading! Chapter one’s title is from October by Alessia Cara. Take care, you guys! <3


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